Employment of Women in Singapore

1541 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: How to write a essay on challenges faced by women in this society

One of the key challenges faced by working women is striking a harmony between work and personal or family life. To be a good mother necessitates less time spent at the workplace, and to have a full time job means less time spent with their children. In the present work environment, women can have more children and continue to work but they will suffer from anxiety over their children's welfare, or their children will suffer because of the physical and mental burden women have of balancing family concerns and work. However, if women opt out of the work force, they will forgo the benefits of employment, including social integration, social status and financial independence. As life expectancy of women increases, good health and effective financial management are important to ensure that when they live and work longer, they are also financially well prepared for old age. The female participation in the Singapore labor force has risen significantly over the years however it is still lower than that in many developed countries. Singapore women are more likely to drop out of the labor force after marriage and childbirth. Many do not resume work, unlike in Japan and Korea where most of the women would rejoin the workforce when their children are older.

2. INTEREST IN RETURNING TO WORK

In November 1995, the Ministry of Manpower released its report on Women Returning to Work. The 152 women respondents were participants at a series of workshops organized by the NTUC from July to September 1995 to encourage women to return to work. The findings showed that more then three-quarters of non-working women who were keen to go back to work prefer part time jobs 77% and only 13% preferred to work full time. Majority of those who were interested to work preferred clerical (59%) and sales & service jobs (15%). 13% preferred professional, technical & administrative work and 4% preferred production & cleaners work. These preferences could be explained by the educational attainment of the respondents, majority of who had lower secondary or secondary education.

3. REASONS HOLDING WOMEN BACK FROM REJOINING THE WORKFORCE

The most commonly cited reasons holding the women back from joining the workforce were children and household responsibilities, the lack of suitable jobs near their homes, lack of part-time working arrangements and the lack of required qualifications or skills.

A proportion of the females mainly in the 40 to 49 years age group did not know where to look for jobs and had problems adjusting to working life, possibly due to a lack of confidence after a long absence from the workplace.

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Emma Griffith's Liberty Dawn

    1060 Words  | 3 Pages

    Female employment was concentrated in a very small number of low paid areas. The memoirs provided by Emma Griffith in her book are mainly from male perspective. Therefore, the information provided by them can be misleading and in my opinion, often a lot is missed out of what men did not consider as relevant but in fact is the information which really needs be shared. Above that, the stereotype existed during this time. Men were considered as the breadwinner and women were supposed to do the household work and take care of children. But in fact, Industrial Revolution in part was fuelled by the economic necessity of many women, single and married, to find waged work outside their

    Read More

  • G.I. Jane: Women in the Marine Corp

    1671 Words  | 4 Pages

    Even these limited options that provided women with opportunities were not available for the right reasons. The State Library of Victoria adds that, “Only the rising need for labor and the diminishing supply of manpower has forced this revolutionary adjustment”(10). Up until when the labor force desperately needed women, they received few opportunities and unequal pay. Even after many factories were forced to hire women workers they begrudgingly did...

    Read More

  • Women's Employment in the 1940s

    6013 Words  | 13 Pages

    Many factors affected the changes in women’s employment. The change that occurred went through three major phases: the prewar period in the early 1940s, the war years from 1942-1944, and the post war years from around 1945-1949. The labor shortage that occurred as men entered the military propelled a large increase in women’s entrance into employment during the war. Men's return to the civilian workforce at the end of the war caused the sudden drop to prewar levels. The cause of the sudden decline during post war years of women in the paid workforce is unclear. Many questions are left unanswered: What brought women into the war industry, ...

    Read More

  • The 1940's: Women In The Workforce

    1292 Words  | 3 Pages

    The 1940’s were a turning point for women in the workforce. Women were perceived to be the weaker sex by society and faced social prejudices in efforts to become part of the workforce. The common belief was that women were intellectually inferior to men, incapable of making decisions regarding their household, and should not work outside of the home. Their job was to maintain the home, raise the children, and be supportive wives of the working husband.

    Read More

  • The Negative Impacts Of Gender Inequality

    1061 Words  | 3 Pages

    Men are likely to get hired if they have children and tend to get paid more. In contrast, women are less likely to get hired even though they have more quality and children. This is when the gender inequality come in. In this article “The Motherhood Penalty vs. the Fatherhood Bonus” the author presented the role and the impact between the roles of the genders. Michelle Budig, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst put it this way, “The inequality of gender role reveals when men get paid high for having children and women pay the biggest price for the low income” (Qtd. in Miller). According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71 percent of mothers are with their children working at home and 40 percent are the primary bread winner (Pew Research Center). In this perspective of women working at home and men working in career shift the qualification between them. The inequality is that employer sees the father as a commit worker and a mother as a distraction in workplaces because women have extra hours of work to do at home with their children and house chores. Claire Miller states that, “one of the worst career moves a women can make is to have children” (Claire Miller). As for the women in the United States, there are a lot of negative impact for them if they decide to have babies. The quality for them shrink to the corner while men hold the advantage of having

    Read More

  • Women and the Workforce

    3921 Words  | 8 Pages

    received the right to work menial jobs for minimum pay with less job security. She has

    Read More

  • Women in the Workforce

    1672 Words  | 4 Pages

    “Statistical Overview of Women in the Workplace”. www.catalyst.org. Catalyst. 19 June 2012. Web. 1 November 2012.

    Read More

  • Women of world War 2

    1095 Words  | 3 Pages

    Women opportunities and lifestyles were negatively impacted due to the inequalities that women faced in the working sphere. The wage gap the years following World War Two were obviously lower than the men's. It was in the 1980's when women only earned sixty-four cents to a male dollar. Although laws came into effect like the Equal Pays Act in 1963, there were still unfairness with wages. It did very little in changing women's status as women were still not seen equally to men. Women were maintained as a cheap labour force because society thought that the insignificance of women's work would be threatened if women and men share the same jobs. To ensure the continuation of inexpensive women labour, they were confined to certain jobs which became known as " female occupations". This gender segregation further claimed that women's work was less important, hence appropriate for l...

    Read More

  • Canadian Women Entrepreneurs Case Study

    1255 Words  | 3 Pages

    Women are also more likely to operate businesses in the service sectors rather than in knowledge and manufacturing industries, which traditionally enjoy higher growth potential and profitability (Barbara Orser, 2007)

    Read More

  • Women's Roles In The 1920s Essay

    895 Words  | 2 Pages

    During the Great War and the huge amount of men that were deployed created the need to employ women in hospitals, factories, and offices. When the war ended the women would return home or do more traditional jobs such as teaching or shop work. “Also in the 1920s the number of women working raised by fifty percent.” They usually didn’t work if they were married because they were still sticking to the role of being stay at home moms while the husband worked and took care of the family financially. But among the single women there was a huge increase in employment. “Women were still not getting payed near as equally as men and were expected to quit their jobs if they married or pregnant.” Although women were still not getting payed as equally it was still a huge change for the women's

    Read More

  • Housewife to Career: The Growth of Women in The Labor Markert

    1555 Words  | 4 Pages

    For centuries, women has always been dominated and controlled by men. Society has viewed women as the weaker gender and relied on men in order to survive. As time went on, things have changed, society has became more advance and so are women. During the World War II, women have increased their role in the society by replacing the men’s in the labor market and also increased their status in the society. Today, the growth of women in the work force continually to raise and so are their status. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the National Bureau of Economic Research, statistics have shown 58.1% of women were in the labor market in 2011 (USBLS) compared to employment rate during the war was 35% of women in the labor market in 1945 (Bussing-Burks). So what factors must have interested women to move from being housewife to the work force? Explanations can be derived through observations of their relationship in the household, their relative status in the society, and their rationality in decision-making.

    Read More

  • Sexism In The Workplace Essay

    2031 Words  | 5 Pages

    Half of all employees in the US alone are women and yet “only around five percent hold senior positions (Source 11)”. According to this, one can assume that out of all the employees in the US, only around three percent are women in senior positions, which is a small number of women. However, the representation of women in large corporations is bigger with twenty five percent as higher level managers (“Sexism in the workplace”). Small numbers of women in different kinds of jobs is still common in today’s jobs, even though some may consider the sexes to be equal. They are also underrepresented in blue collar jobs such as construction workers, precision production, and mine working. The cause of these small numbers could be because the employers of these jobs are sexist and the gender of the applicant matters when finding people to fill the jobs, but this is not always the case. Women could also not be applying for the blue collar jobs as well. They may not do this because they do not feel that they could stand doing the heavy duty work. Men could be convincing them that they could not last in the job, when in reality they most certainly

    Read More

  • Men Oppress Women Essay

    2199 Words  | 5 Pages

    Women used to stay home and take care of children or work part-time jobs. However, economic times have made it almost impossible to survive off of solely one income. Therefore, more women have joined the workforce which greatly contributed to the shrink of the wage gap, but there is still a large difference in working hours between men and women. From what we have already seen through Sobering’s research, women still obtain large responsibilities outside of the home. Because of this, women are not able to work the same amount of hours as men. Mandel and Semyonov’s research concluded that, “..in all decades, more than 90 % of men work more than 40 weekly hours), whereas the variance among women is much larger (more than one-third of working women worked fewer than 40 hours)” (Mandel and Semyonov). Therefore, women have greatly increased their working hours in the past decade, but most women still work less hours than men.

    Read More

  • Discrimination For Women In The Workplace Essay

    1223 Words  | 3 Pages

    Discrimination for women in the workforce in the 1900’s were fewer than 25% of those who participated in the labor market. But in today’s time the percent has risen to around 75% and is still growing. As many women were affected in the workforce by prejudice. One in four women go though discrimination during the workforce process at least once during her life. Unlike men women are more likely to accept a lower income job because they have a house to clean, and also a husband and family to take care of. A fact is known that all women will make less over their lifetime then men will. More women are encouraged to follow the stereotypical career path such as nursing and teaching then doing construction work or even being a truck

    Read More

  • How Our World is Changing

    1511 Words  | 4 Pages

    Women were drawn into the work place in the 1960's when the economy expanded and rising consumer aspirations fueled the desire of many families for a second income. By 1960, 30.5 percent of all wives worked and the number of women graduating from college grew. (Echols, 400) Women soon found they were being treated differently and paid less then their male co-workers.

    Read More

More about Employment of Women in Singapore

Open Document