How To Build A Singaporean Woman: Pay Her Fairly

“How To Build A Singaporean Woman” is a Her World original docuseries which highlights the social and cultural issues that women in Singapore face, and asks: what does it mean to be a Singaporean woman today? In the fifth episode, “Pay Her Fairly”, Sabrina Ho, founder and CEO of Half The Sky, a leading career platform for women, and Patricia Ho Douven, founder and design director of interior design firm White Jacket, share their experiences with gender discrimination at work, discuss how the workplace can be made more inclusive for women, and how having more women in leadership roles can benefit the economy and society at all levels.

An unconscious bias

Sabrina recalls a meeting with one client from the start of her recruitment business, where she and her co-worker didn’t end up sharing their job titles. She recounts, “You can clearly see [that] the client always will talk to my male colleague, [and] kind of ignoring me during the entire meeting.” 

These experiences aren’t unique. Patricia, who runs an interior design firm for hospitality and F&B businesses, recalls a recent dinner she had. “So the contractor who was also there at dinner, and the whole time, he was talking to my colleague who is a guy, and he completely ignored me.”

It was only after their staff or clients who were at the meeting with them referred to them as the boss, that attention was directed towards them. Both women attribute this to how there’s still “an unconscious bias”, a sense of disbelief at seeing women in positions of authority. 

A lack of women leaders

Sabrina lays down some statistics: “For the global workforce, women nearly contribute half of it. But women occupy only around 32% of senior management positions [...]; In Singapore last year, women’s representation on boards was only around 23%. [...] So you can see, the higher you go, the less women you will see.” Before we can discuss how women can make an impact on boards, there needs to first be women on boards in the first place – as of June 2023, 13 of the largest 100 listed companies on the Singapore Exchange had all-male boards.

Patricia also attests to this dearth of female leadership in her industry. “I do notice all my ex-bosses are male”, she says. “Most of the famous well-known interior design firms for hospitality design are all led by men”. 

The gender pay gap

Sabrina recalls people who think the gender pay gap isn’t an issue: there’d be anecdotal evidence of a female colleague earning more, or a female boss. She urges us to instead take a macro view, looking at the data. The median income for women working in Singapore was 14.3% less than men in 2023. And after removing the effects of occupation and other labour market and human capital factors, Singapore’s adjusted gender pay gap in 2023 was 6 per cent. 

“I feel that there’s probably some kind of invisible standards between companies [...], pre-set expectations”, suggests Patricia. She recounts examples of when the fees proposed by her company were considered too high, even though they were not the highest in the market. There was one incident which particularly affected her when discussions on her firm’s involvement in a high-profile project were cancelled “because the owner said she didn’t want a female designer. She wants a white male designer.”

Supporting mothers

Even today, there’s plenty of stigma against those becoming mothers in the workforce. Sabrina recounts an example from her work: “A turning point for me was an incident with one of my candidates – all along the whole interview process, she’s a star candidate; client, HR, everyone loved her. She went all the way to the offering stage. During the offering process, she broke the news to me that she was pregnant, and I was very happy for her when I got the news – but she was very concerned.”

“A week [went] by, [and we] didn’t hear from them. Something felt off to me. During the first phone call when I broke the news to them, I could tell already but I just didn’t want to believe it. I think she expected it already. We both got really emotional doing that phone call. I was saying to her, ‘I’m really sorry, you don’t deserve this’.”

“There are many cases where women actually say sorry when they’re pregnant. It’s like you don’t need to say sorry – it’s great news. Why do you think you need to apologise for it?”

In light of such career pressures, Patricia brings up what she’s done in her workplace to be friendlier to staff with child commitments. “For me, I’m very flexible about such things. So we do have colleagues even before COVID, they were doing four days a week and things like that. So I think when you’re a mother, of course you have priority. I mean, as long as it is discussed before and everyone has mutual respect, you know what is your job and you make sure that you deliver – I think people understand it.”

Sabrina suggests from her experiences that recognising the talents of career women who are mothers is also dependent on the company culture. “Speaking to so many companies through Half The Sky, there are companies that truly value the talent that they hire and they will do whatever they can to attract them. And I think the other solution that I’ve known from some of my clients would be [...] hire part-timers when they go on maternity leave. And when they come back, the role is there for them because that’s how much they value their female talent.” 

Why ensuring gender equality in the workforce is so important

Patricia reiterates her hopes for the future. “I would like to see more Asian-led companies in the competition, especially female Asians because currently most of the big boys… are still boys. So it would be great to see some babes around.”

“I know for a fact that a lot of countries, governments and companies are very determined [...]. They’re actually doing this report to review the data from their companies, to hold themselves accountable,” says Sabrina. While she considered that honourable, she emphasises that if companies “want to attract and retain female talents, they need to have policies that really cater to women when they go through different career life cycles.”

She asserts the importance of attracting female talent. “For any company that wants to compete on a global stage, you have to have a diverse workforce because your customer bases are diverse. And how are you going to attract a diverse workforce and retain them? One of the ways will be a safe environment,” says Sabrina. 

She offers an economic argument: “When you think about the gender pay gap, it’s actually not good for the economy as well. Just think about the money that women make less because of the pay gap and the money that we can contribute back to the economy. We can invest that money and then compound interest throughout their entire career [and] life cycles, the money that we can invest back into the economy, to, you know, lift off a family, there’s a lot of different factors. It’s not good for the economy, it’s not good for society and, of course, for the women themselves.”

Transcription and article: Saw Yone Yone