In a man's working world, working mums still lag behind

"Singapore best place in Asia to be a mum", proclaimed a headline in The Straits Times last week.

A "State of the World's Mothers" report had ranked Singapore the highest in Asia ahead of South Korea (30) and Japan (32).

Released by international charity Save The Children, the report looked at data from 178 countries and territories, and relied on five key indicators of maternal well-being - mortality, child health, access to education, national per capita income and political participation among women.

Singapore's pole position in Asia is hardly surprising, given that in many parts of the world's largest continent, mothers still lead lives fraught with danger, deprivation and despair.

Millions in South and South-east Asia cannot fulfil even basic human needs. In India, for example, around 130 women still die every day from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications.

In Afghanistan, four in five teenagers and young women still can't read or write. And in Laos, nearly six in 10 women don't have access to even a single skilled health-care worker while delivering their babies.

East and West Asian countries, on the other hand, are richer with better acccess to health and basic education. But mothers there often lead lives of woefully thwarted potential when it comes to participation in work or government.

In Japan, only one in 10 members of parliament is a woman; in Qatar, none. And in Saudi Arabia, the female labour force participation rate is just 16 per cent.

The top three spots on the Save The Children survey went to Finland, Norway and Sweden, all high-tax welfare states renowned as much for gender equality as for happy working mothers, and academically successful but stress-free kids. Finland was the only country in the world to be among the top 15 in all five indicators.

In terms of fulfilling basic maternal needs, Singapore ranks 15th worldwide - higher even than many other developed countries like the United States (31), Britain (26) and Canada (18).

That's no small achievement, but it has far more to do with meticulous infrastructure planning and good governance than individual mothers' achievements.

Yet, despite much introspection on plummeting fertility rates and the obvious need for more babies, there is a paucity of publicly available data on the economic and social well-being of mothers in Singapore.

There is no data on the proportion of working mothers here, for instance, although there is an imperfect proxy: Around 61 per cent of married women here work. But it is not known how many of them have children.

In member states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), on the other hand, maternal employment rates range from 80 per cent in Sweden and Denmark, to around 70 per cent in Canada and the US, to around 60 per cent in Japan.

The OECD, a group of 34 developed countries, routinely tracks well-being indicators to better formulate policies that improve economic and social development.

So it also tracks how much mothers earn compared to fathers in similar jobs, and how much fathers help at home.

The gender wage gap - the difference in earnings between a man and a woman in similar jobs expressed as a percentage of male earnings - is only 7 per cent among childless couples in OECD countries. This means that for every dollar a man earns, the woman earns 93 cents. But factor in children, and it widens to 22 per cent.

The two Asian members of the OECD are near the bottom of the heap - the parental wage gap among Koreans is 46 per cent, and among Japanese, a whopping 61 per cent.

Singapore does not publish such data. But even using all women as a proxy for mothers does not augur well, especially when it comes to wages.

Women remain less educated than men and far fewer make it to the top of the wage ladder. As of last year, only 29,400 women here earned $12,000 or more a month compared to 85,000 men. And only around 8.3 per cent of corporate board positions here are held by women.

OECD data shows that parental roles have slowly begun to converge - fathers are doing more at home and more mums are taking the role of main breadwinner.

And although mothers here have greater access to affordable childcare, domestic help and family support networks than in the West, prevalent social attitudes don't augur well for mums who aspire to do less at home and more at work.

In a survey of more than 1,300 people by women's group the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) last year, 58 per cent of male respondents said women should take care of household chores and caregiving, compared with 47 per cent of the female respondents.

Manpower Ministry statistics, meanwhile, show that 43.3 per cent of economically inactive women cited housework, childcare and other caregiving duties as the main reasons for not looking for a job, compared with only 1.8 per cent of men.

OECD data shows that countries with the smallest gender gap in unpaid work are those which have the highest female employment rates.

Every country will always have groups of married women who eschew careers by choice and feel happy and fulfilled by being full-time wives and mothers.

But chances are that as women get more educated, some may opt to "lean in" at work - to use American women's advocate and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg's famous words - given decent wages and work hours, opportunities for advancement, help with domestic duties and a stress-free education system.

A study released last week by the Pew Research Centre in the United States, for instance, showed that only one in 10 highly educated mothers - those with a Master's degree or higher - is staying home to care for their families.

Such data for Singapore would be crucial, given that highly educated women may opt out of careers to raise children or decide not to have children at all, doubting the possibility of doing it all.

Better data can lead to more targeted public policies, spur citizens to make more informed life choices and ultimately forge better lives.

Nowhere is this more crucial than with the lives of women who hold the key to the next generation in child-scarce Singapore - and across the world.

Happy Mother's Day!

This article was published on May 11 in The Straits Times.

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