The gender wage gap is very real and remains visibly so here last year when the inequality widened in Singapore.
Financial analysis site ValueChampion found that there’s much to be improved on in terms of Singapore’s gender wage gap after evaluating data released by the Ministry of Manpower. Last year, the median wage for women working full time was 87.5 percent of the median wage for men — a lower figure than the 90.8 percent in 2017.
“We found that the wage gap tends to be particularly high in the health & social services, manufacturing, accommodation & food services, information & communications and financial & insurance services industries,” wrote ValueChampion’s William Hoffmann.
This would suggest that women are less likely to have some of the highest paying roles in the country. In the financial and insurance industry, for example, women make up 52 percent of the workforce, but only 43 percent of them are earning at least $7,000 per month.
The gender wage gap, on the other hand, is relatively smaller in industries such as real estate, construction, arts and recreation, and other service-related sectors. Interestingly enough, the median wage for women working in the transportation and storage sectors as well as administrative and support services is actually higher than it is for men.
ValueChampion notes that the wage discrepancy across all industries does not account for job titles, education levels, or work experience. On average, women in Singapore also work about 5 percent fewer hours than men, which can be attributed to women allocating time at home to look after household chores and childcare — “burdens not typically borne by men”.
Not all is doom and gloom; there are some positive trends shown last year. The proportion of board seats held by women in Singapore has more than doubled in the past five years from 7.5 percent in 2013 to 15.2 percent in 2018. The gender wage gap for part-time female workers in 2018 has also decreased from 2017. Internationally, Singapore is actually the second-highest country in the world to score top marks in the World Economic Forum’s Survey of Wage Equality Between Women and Men for Similar Work.
