From job interview to the boardroom, gender bias often follows women through each step of the career ladder - CNA

Kimberly Lim Kimberly Lim 11 Jul 2022 08:00AM (Updated: 18 Jul 2022 06:23PM) Bookmark Bookmark Share WhatsApp Telegram Facebook Twitter Email LinkedIn Set CNA as your preferred source on Google Add CNA as a trusted source to help Google better understand and surface our content in search results. Read a summary of this article on FAST. Get bite-sized news via a newcards interface. Give it a try. Click here to return to FAST Tap here to return to FAST FAST 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.

CNA Games Guess Word Crack the word, one row at a time Buzzword Create words using the given letters Mini Sudoku Tiny puzzle, mighty brain teaser Mini Crossword Small grid, big challenge Word Search Spot as many words as you can Show More Show Less “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. 

A woman who wanted to be known only as Rachel said that when she was applying for jobs as a fresh graduate, she was asked at two separate interviews with public sector agencies if she had plans to get married and settle down in the future. 

Rachel, now 36 and a chief marketing officer at an advisory firm, said she decided to speak up at one of these interviews: "I found it extremely offensive but I knew that if I called it out, it would be game over. But I called it out and said 'I don't think you would be asking this question if I were a male.'"

This incident may have happened about a decade ago but Ms Sher-li Torrey, the founder of Mums@Work, a social enterprise dedicated to supporting women to find work-family balance, said that hiring managers have found ways to ask the same question in disguise. 

For example, earlier this year, a mother of two children told Ms Torrey about how she was asked at a job interview if she “liked big families” and if she herself came from a big family. 

“It was the follow-up comments that got her to realise what the male employer was probably implying: ‘Our team works very long hours. If you join us, you will be the only other parent.’” 

Ms Torrey said this question, which is typically only directed at female candidates, is indicative of gender bias.

“The fact that you would ask this of a female interviewee means you expect a female employee with kids to not be able to contribute as much, or that their choosing to have kids will affect productivity," she said.

“Would you ask a male interviewee that? And if no, why not? That answer alone is already proof of gender inequality.”

Once past the interview, a working woman who chooses to start a family might then face more bias, especially in organisations with a culture of working around the clock at the expense of a healthy personal or family life. 

When Ms Rasyida Samsudin Paddy was still at her previous company, she got pregnant with her first child.

She soon began noticing that she was increasingly being left out of certain group discussions and grew worried that once she gave birth, she would not be able to keep up with the company's culture of regularly working past midnight. 

"Nobody said to my face that I couldn't get certain opportunities because I was pregnant. Instead, it was a group of people getting together without me and I was not in the loop on information or opportunities that I could have otherwise gotten," said the 33-year-old, who is now a senior marketing manager at a multinational firm.

"There was a lot of anxiety on my part... Was I expected to pull late nights again, which seems to be a celebrated attribute for employees in my organisation? Would people talk behind my back about how I am not a team player when I need to leave at 6pm to pick up my kid?" 

In another incident, Ms Paddy was asked by a colleague at the same former company to wear loose clothes before a business pitch to "hide" her pregnancy from her clients. 

"I also wasn't quite sure whom I could report the incident to. It was a small and medium enterprise so human resource structures and policies were not so clear," she said. 

A spokesperson from SheSays Singapore, an organisation that runs free events and mentorship for women across different industries, said Ms Paddy's case is far from unique, as the organisation continues to hear of women missing out on big projects after returning from maternity leave.

A spokesperson from United Women Singapore agreed, saying that women are still perceived as the main caretaker of the household and children, while men are viewed as primary breadwinners.

In 2020, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) conducted its first-ever nationwide study on the gender wage gap, which revealed that in 2018, women were still earning 6 per cent less, on average, than a man with the same job in the same industry, and of the same age and educational qualifications. 

Among the possible reasons cited for this gap were women’s propensity to play the role of the primary caregiver at home and hence are more likely to take time off work, and gender discrimination.