SINGAPORE — At the start of this year, Valerie joined a multinational company in the finance sector as a fresh graduate in an analyst role.
Six months into the job, her manager ordered her to fetch him a glass of water. She found it offensive but she agreed to do so anyway because she was new and did not want to ruffle any feathers.
“As I was about to take his water bottle, he said that he was joking and that women are always so eager to please men,” the 27-year-old recounted.
She, like many other women who spoke to TODAY for this article, declined to be named as she is still working at the same company.
“I walked out and in response, he said ‘Women are always sulking’.”
Yes, it’s 2022 and women are still receiving comments like these at work.
In interviews with 13 working women and two women’s groups, TODAY found that gender discrimination is still alive and well across various industries, in companies big and small and faced by women at all levels of their career, whether rookie or board member.
To be fair, women in Singapore have made huge strides at the workplace over the past several decades, with the Republic taking the top spot globally for having the highest percentage of female chief executive officers, according to a Deloitte report released this year.
To further promote equality, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced during last year's National Day Rally that the Government will be introducing a set of laws to better protect workers against discrimination based on nationality, age, race, gender and disability.
And then in March this year, Parliament endorsed the first ever White Paper on women’s development, which included recommendations such as the introduction of new workplace fairness legislation and the entrenchment of flexible work arrangements and professional development programmes for women.
Many companies, too, have taken steps over the past decade or so to implement initiatives such as diversity training and flexi-work programmes to promote gender equality.
But laws and policies can only do so much as long as some stubborn biases remain, many interviewees said.
Women with decades of working experience told TODAY that they have certainly seen progress since they first started work, with greater awareness of gender discrimination and more opportunities for advancement.
But they add that women today face new challenges.
More are becoming professionals, while still bearing a disproportionate burden of household duties and caregiving. And so they are juggling more responsibilities overall and are sometimes penalised at work for it.
And the fact that there is more awareness about gender equality these days has also made discrimination harder to pin down and call out.
Several women told TODAY about situations where they strongly suspected that they were being subject to gender bias, but they had no real evidence because their colleagues were careful not to be overtly sexist.
This comes hand in hand with another trend highlighted by several female leaders of “diversity washing”, where organisations implement superficial diversity policies that look good for their brands but fail to effect any change.
Ms Nurul Jihadah Hussain, the founder of The Codette Project, an initiative to support minority women in tech, said that too often, companies are quick to pat themselves on the back after hiring a few people from diverse backgrounds and call it a day.
"Companies are pointing at one or two individuals, who may be exceptions, and saying 'We are doing okay'. What they should do instead is to ask themselves: 'We have these individuals and that's great, but how can we do better?'"
In September last year, Manpower Minister Tan See Leng said that the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices (Tafep) receives an annual average of 49 gender-related discrimination complaints between 2014 and first half of 2021, behind nationality and age-related discrimination complaints.
Meanwhile, a 2020 survey by the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry that polled 384 respondents, 67 per cent of whom were women, found that four in 10 women had experienced gender discrimination in the workplace. However, only 12 per cent of them had made reports.
In another survey published in 2021 by market research consultancy Blackbox, which polled 2,000 Singaporeans on their perceptions, attitudes and experiences with gender inequalities, 20 per cent of the female respondents said they had missed out on job promotions because of their gender.
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2022-07-11 00:00:00Z
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