A Singapore Mother's Voice

People are our key national resource but with a 1.25% total fertility rate and our ageing demographics, our population cannot replenish itself. This fact plus economics drive a present policy of attracting high skilled foreign migrations, despite clear risks of losing some of our “Singaporeaness”. I am not against bringing in foreign migrants but believe that more can be done to augment our indigenous population if Government policies are better understood across the board, and better coordinated and articulated to send out a uniform message rather than a mixed or contradicting one. Please allow me to elaborate: -

1. The Woman’s Role
The Department of Statistics occasional report, “Trends in Dual-Career Couples, 2005”, shows that the Singapore female labour force participation rates (“FLFPR”) has increased from 30 per cent in 1921 to 56.6% in 2006, with the highest rate for women aged 25 - 29. With a mean marrying age of 27.9 for women, the sharp decline in the FLFPR for those age 30 – 34 years and older, may be attributed to childcare priorities and related household duties over career for many women. The overall FLFPR for married women in 2006 is 53 per cent, of which 92.4 per cent were in full-time jobs, leaving 47 per cent who never return to a working career.

Dual–career couples constituted 27% of all married couples in Singapore in 1980. This increased to 44% in 2000 and stabilized at 43.8% in 2005. The working wife also contributes 42% of the couple’s income. Thus Singapore women are no longer confined to the traditional “one role” home-making ideology but are more widely involved in career roles as well.

This however is not without both personal and social costs.

Dual-income couples have fewer children than sole-career couples. In 2005, the statistics are 2.2 children versus 2.5 children respectively, narrowing from a wider gap in earlier years. However there is an alarming trend for younger dual income couples not to have children at all (known in the West as DINKS, or Dual Income No Kids)! For our 15-34 age group women, 40% in dual career marriages have no children versus 18% in single career marriages!

Factor in the other “worrying trend” of more women remaining single highlighted by Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng recently, plus the tendency of more married women postponing child bearing for the sake of career first, and you have a powerful multiplier effect working relentlessly against our indigenous population sustainability! These same factors are already having devastating effects on the mature developed countries, and we are not far behind. We therefore need to reverse course urgently and now.

The cause versus effect in the statistics: whether it is the women’s career that reduces childbirths or the reduced birth rates that keep her working longer – may have to be further researched but the answer is likely to be recursive with both factors playing upon and influencing each other. What is clear – and this is seen in the globalization trends with its influx of Western societal values – is that women are placing career and short-term monetary gains ahead of child-bearing and nation-building. In the West, policy is driven by election cycles with no party remaining in power long enough to see far enough down the road twenty or more years hereafter when children, borne out of full-time mother’s sacrifices become highly productive economic and social contributors to society and nation-building. In Singapore, your Government is uniquely placed to do otherwise!

The inevitable final effect is the reverse pyramid demography, already emerging in some countries: one working person sustaining two retirees instead of the past natural pattern of perhaps one retiree supported by two working persons. This would place tremendous strain on social infrastructure and taxation, and greatly reduce our national competitiveness.

Can we afford to be immobile, rendered paralyzed by the seemingly inevitable? Definitely not! Otherwise, all the good years that we have enjoyed under the PAP Government would in a short time – twenty years or less perhaps – be a thing of history.



2. Impossible Equality
The increase in the FLFPR does not bring about gender equality despite Singapore women’s overall legal and social status having significantly improved. Less than 3 per cent of women are in high level executive management positions. Women are still dominantly in production and clerical work, which are vulnerable to economic fluctuations, retrenchment, low pay and low chances for advancement. The wage gap between male and female at the same job levels remains consistently at 15 to 30 per cent over the years.

Working mothers face even more job discrimination and pressure - and this is the first area of mixed signals in Government policy making.

Today’s mothers face far greater challenges than their counterparts of a past generation whose roles were culturally and socially defined in terms of childbearing, child caring and homemaking. Today’s working mothers face the three paradoxes, identified by Lee, Campbell and Chia (1999), of 1) conflict of interest of social policies and thus mixed signals which place working mothers under a great dilemma; 2) conflict between paid work and family, especially childcare concerns, and 3) organisational barriers as they advance in their careers.

Women in Western countries have encountered similar difficult motherhood choices. The “one role” ideology restricts her social roles to the home, but the “two role” ideology incorporating career with sole homemaker duties imposes true hardships on her. The latter shared-role ideology appears attractive to today’s women but given Singapore’s Asian traditional values for women, she could be left in a lurch without true or strong social support.

Men and women are different and created to be different. Equality is not found in having equal functionalities but rather in having our diversity; those different unique strengths and functions, which cannot be replaced or excelled by the other. This is why perhaps the majority of women are still employed in traditional women’s occupations. That is not suggesting that women cannot be successful in male dominated occupations but she would have to pay a higher price to achieve such success than her male counterparts.

The one job uniquely belonging to women is childbearing! Men cannot perform this role. Can Singapore prosper by pushing our women deeper into the working world for short term economic gains, at the sacrifice of this precious natural gift and longer term economic loss?