Gender equality at work not about quotas, but recognising women's abilities: President Tharman

Helping women to achieve their full potential at work is not a matter of setting quotas to ensure workplace representation, but of avoiding blinkers and recognising the full range of their abilities, said President Tharman Shanmugaratnam.

- Shermaine Ang

Speaking at the Singapore Council of Women's Organisations (SCWO) Summit for Action on Gender Equality on Sept 5, he called on employers to be more family-friendly with flexible work arrangements and to increase women's representation at senior management levels.

Held at One Farrer Hotel, the first such summit by SCWO national coordinating body of women's organisations in Singapore was launched in 2024 to lead conversations on how to tackle systemic and personal issues relating to gender equality.

Mr Tharman noted that Singapore fares well internationally on measures of gender equality. It ranked eighth in the latest UN Human Development Report's Gender Inequality Index, and was the only Asia-Pacific country to make it to the list of top 10 least unequal countries.

Singapore's adjusted gender pay gap of about 6 per cent a measure of gaps between women's and men's pay after taking into account differences in job roles is also lower than in the US and Canada, he said.

Mr Tharman said the "glass" of gender equality is "close to full" when it comes to legal rights and protections for girls and women, and "more than half full" with regard to economic empowerment, but appears "less than half full" when it comes to the imbalances in men and women's domestic responsibilities.

He added: "We must make the workplace more family-friendly and make further gains in women's representation at senior management levels."