Today, we celebrate International Women’s Day and applaud achievements by prominent women like Ada Lovelace, Sheryl Sandberg, Michelle Obama, and Malala Yousafzai, who in their own ways pioneered the path for further achievements in the fields of science, business, technology, education, and activism. While we celebrate the accomplishments of great women before and during our time, we still have some way to go in achieving equality between men and women in the workplace. Despite major strides in championing causes for women, men still make, on average, 19% more than women. In Singapore, after taking into account industry, age, and education, women make 6% less than men for similar work.
There have been various reasons offered to explain this shrinking – but persistent – gender pay gap. Among them are higher barriers to entry, perceptions of work-life balance, and stigma associated with having children. According to a new LinkedIn survey, almost half (49%) of the women surveyed in Singapore feel that they receive fewer career development opportunities compared to men. Even though flexible work arrangements are now increasingly available for both men and women to be able to work from home, women cited a lack of time as the main barrier for them to achieve work-related opportunities.
Indeed, my research on job connectedness corroborates this. I surveyed 195 working adults in Singapore with regards to remaining connected to work-related matters using technological devices remotely. While there is no gender difference in the preference to interweave work and personal matters and to work from home, men tend to be able to connect to work-related matters more often.
Men also tend to voluntarily connect to work matters from home, as opposed to women who may not have the time to remain connected to work-related issues when attending to family matters at home. These differences reduce slightly when taking into account the number of young children in the household. That is, when men increasingly take up childcare responsibilities, they have less focus for work-related matters when they are at home.
According to PWC’s 2018 Women in Work survey, the length of paid maternity leave is also a contributing factor to the gender pay gap in OECD countries. The longer a new mother is on paid maternity leave, the more likely she is to earn less money than a new father. These sentiments are echoed by working women in Singapore. Such topics are discussed in forums like Conversations on Singapore Women’s Developments, where women fear being overlooked for promotion or advancement opportunities upon their return from maternity leave.
What could women do to overcome the gender pay gap? Research by Carnegie Mellon professor Linda Babcock suggests that women should ask! Women should be assertive and ask for that pay raise, ask for development opportunities, and ask for professional support upon their return from maternity leave. Some researchers found that in workplace negotiations, women tend to more willingly accept first offers of salary without further negotiation. When they do negotiate, they tend to ask for less than men – partly because of their own beliefs in their abilities, and because women tend to value harmonious relationships. Asking for more might threaten the working relationship, and compared to men, women tend to value long-term relationships more and short-term financial gains less. This is not to say that women are worse negotiators than men. They simply calculate costs and benefits of a negotiation differently and have different definitions of a successful outcome.
Even equipped with this information, women still do not choose to negotiate or to ask for more – and with good reason! A study by Babcock and colleagues found that when women negotiated their starting salaries, they faced a penalty 5.5 times larger than that faced by men. Women receive a backlash for gender deviance when they act too “masculine”. They are perceived as demanding and difficult to work with – whereas men exhibiting the same behaviours are described as go-getters and business-savvy.
Involve men and women in women advancement
The way to go forward? Involve men in negotiation processes for women advancement. Choose to challenge traditional ways of negotiation for oneself. Research has suggested that women may be more accommodating to others when negotiating for themselves, but tend to be more assertive when they are fighting for the rights of others. Some powerful policies are passed because we had passionate women fighting for such causes such as the late United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, US civil rights activist Rosa Parks, and our own first female president Halimah Yacob.
Yet, when only women are at the conversation table, men tend to tune out. Male decision-makers need to not only be aware of the barriers to advancement for women, but they also need to be part of the organisational processes that help women overcome these barriers. Setting up committees that help negotiate first salaries, benefits, and career advancement opportunities for all incoming staff members could be a step. By objectively assessing the merits of various candidates and not anchoring compensation packages based on what is asked, this solves the problem of disparate starting salaries among the different genders. Having both women and men in such committees is beneficial for the process in order to balance out different perspectives, and hinge on women’s negotiation skills to campaign for others.
Mentoring programmes aimed at women like the Young Women’s Leadership Connection, Women Entrepreneur Mentorship Programme, and Lean In, are excellent avenues to nurture young women in Singapore to develop their potential. Seeing successful women in their fields inspire the younger generation to emulate their mentors and get them to believe that they, too, can achieve greatness. Yet, when men are excluded from these networks, they might still perceive gender equality as a cause they do not need to be involved in, when the contrary is true. Men need to be involved in these conversations as both genders are involved in important decisions being made in organisations. Coaching women to negotiate for more may be ineffective in climates where implicit gender bias is still present and where women receive a penalty for “behaving like men”. The Women Entrepreneur Mentorship Programme includes male mentors – an excellent step in the right direction.
The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is “Choose to Challenge”. Let us choose to challenge the status quo. Let us break down the barriers for entry and advancement, let us remove the stigma of motherhood, and let us reduce the biases against strong women. Most importantly, let us choose to challenge – together.