Although Singapore has made big strides in raising employment opportunities for women, they are still earning less than men. This conclusion has been arrived at using a measurement called the gender pay gap, which refers to the difference in the median incomes for female and male employees expressed as a percentage of the median income of male employees. The median income for women working here was 14.3 per cent less than that for men in 2023, admittedly a narrower gap than the 16.3 per cent in 2018, according to the latest Ministry of Manpower data.

The narrowing of the gap is welcome, but more needs to be done to reduce it further. Clearly, human resources personnel must play an interventionist role to reduce any disparity in pay on account of gender. They can do so by adhering to the faultless principle that compensation should be based on merit, skills, experience and performance, not on inherited and discredited notions of the putative economic strengths of male workers over their female counterparts.