This letter was originally published in TODAY on 8 March 2020.

By Margaret Thomas, President, Association of Women for Action and Research

Every International Women’s Day we try to find something that we can celebrate. But the reality of our progress on gender equality disappoints year after year. 

A recently released United Nations study looked at gender inequality and attitudes towards women. It found that nearly 90 per cent of all people are biased against women. Singapore’s figure, at 92 per cent, is higher than the global average.

Ninety per cent of women in Singapore, and 94 per cent of men, held these biases — indicating that biases against women are not in fact the exclusive domain of men. 

The study, which measures how social beliefs obstruct gender equality in politics, work, physical integrity and education, contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80 per cent of the world’s population. 

Singapore performed worse than the global average in beliefs relating to politics and education. Whereas half of the world believed that men make better political leaders, in Singapore, 76 per cent held that view. On education, 26 per cent of people in Singapore believed that going to university is more important for men than women — slightly higher than the global average of 25 per cent. 

On economic-based dimensions, which measured the number of people who believe that “men should have more right to a job than women” and “men make better business executives than women do”, Singapore did better, at 52 per cent compared to the overall average of 56 per cent.

Of course, “better” is relative — the sad fact is, more than half of men and women in Singapore believe that men’s right to a job trumps that of women.  

As if all this was not sobering enough, a greater punch to the gut is that overall biases against gender equality have become worse over time. Further, between 2004-2009 and 2010-2014, the proportion of women who held some bias against women saw a greater increase (from 83.4 to 84.6 per cent) than the proportion of men who held some bias against women (from 89.4 to 89.9 per cent). 

It’s tempting to dismiss biases as just theoretical beliefs that don’t have the capacity to do harm. However, these biases manifest in real-world disadvantages to women. The study found that where biases against women were stronger, inequality between genders tended to be higher. 

We have to pay attention to biases. Families and schools set gender norms from a young age. They have the capacity to determine men and women’s educational and occupational choices, whether women believe themselves worthy of being in politics, and whether women accept physical violence from their partners as normal and reasonable.

We should introduce comprehensive education on equal gender roles in schools, and convince parents to practise these norms at home. These might be good first steps in our long road to gender equality.