This post was originally published as a press release on 2 March 2023.

2 March 2023 — To bring attention to wage inequality between genders, gender advocacy organisation AWARE has designated Thursday, 2 March 2023 as Singapore’s Pay Gap Day. Pay Gap Day symbolises how far into 2023 the median woman in Singapore must work to earn (in addition to her 2022 earnings) what the median man earned in 2022.

AWARE commemorated this year’s Pay Gap Day—which occurs during the International Women’s Month of March—by launching a fundraising campaign called “Donate Your Gender Pay Gap”. The month-long campaign is an appeal to male feminist allies in Singapore to help eradicate the wage gap, among myriad gendered inequalities, by contributing to AWARE’s research and advocacy, Workplace Harassment and Discrimination Advisory and other efforts to level the playing field for women.

“The median woman in Singapore has to work an extra 61 days to earn what the median man earns in one calendar year. That is a stark injustice,” said Ms Corinna Lim, AWARE’s Executive Director. “Through Pay Gap Day and our campaign, we urge men to take action towards gender equality. We frequently receive inquiries from male allies who share our frustration with gender-based injustices, asking how they can further support our cause. Our hope is that they participate in this endeavour and pledge their commitment to gender equality—not solely financially but symbolically.”

Pay Gap Day takes inspiration from similar events in various parts of the world, such as the United States’ Equal Pay Day, commemorated on 14 March this year. The European Union and the United Nations each observe their own Equal Pay Day.

Thursday, 2 March was named Singapore’s 2023 Pay Gap Day based on the nation’s most recent gender pay gap figures. The unadjusted gap was 14.4% in 2020, which means that resident women aged 25 to 54 working full-time earned $0.856 for every $1.00 earned by resident full-time men. The figure reflects the over-representation of men in higher-paying occupations and sectors, and the over-representation of women in lower-paying ones. This is largely due to occupational segregation, imbalance in caregiving responsibilities and gender discrimination.* This unadjusted gap has been narrowed only slightly in the last decade, and is higher than the OECD average of 12%.

Over a lifetime, the impact of this pay gap is significant. The median amount that a working woman would lose out on over the course of a 40-year career is almost $240,000.** This inequality has a bearing on women’s ability to meet their needs financially and avoid ageing into poverty. According to CPF statistics, only 56% female active CPF members who turned 55 in 2018 hit the Basic Retirement Sum (BRS) of $83,000 in their Retirement Accounts, as compared to 67% of male members.

Despite a wealth of data, various misconceptions persist about the gender pay gap. For example, a 2021 study by AWARE and Quilt.AI found that some social media users in Singapore seek to justify the pay gap by framing it as unofficial compensation for National Service. Elsewhere, the pay gap has been attributed in part to differences in “personality traits and skills, psychological attributes, and choices of field of study”. This erroneously imagines a natural tendency of women to prefer lesser-paying jobs, and overlooks the systemic ways in which society devalues work traditionally performed by women.

AWARE’s “Donate Your Gender Pay Gap” campaign, which is run on the Give.Asia platform, aims to raise a total of $14,400. While donations of all sizes and from all genders are welcome, men are encouraged to give $144, to represent the 14.4% unadjusted gender pay gap. The target would be reached with 100 male allies.

“The gender pay gap is a complex societal issue, and the solution does not solely lie at the feet of individuals,” said Ms Lim. “That’s why this is not just about donations. We hope that the larger impact of our Donate Your Pay Gap campaign will be an increased awareness about gender inequality at the workplace and beyond. Even so, individuals can make a difference in plenty of ways. We urge male allies to use Pay Gap Day, and the upcoming International Women’s Day, as an opportunity to create change however they can—whether by pushing for pay transparency within their own organisations, or alleviating their partners’ or female relatives’ burdens by taking on a larger share of domestic responsibilities.”

“As beneficiaries of a skewed system, it is always easier for men to justify outcomes than to address their root causes,” said Chirag Agarwal, a male AWARE member and co-founder of mental health and well-being start-up Talk Your Heart Out. “We like to attribute differences in pay to ‘market forces’ instead of sexism and discrimination. I hope this campaign helps male allies understand the systemic underpinnings of the gender pay gap, and leads to policy changes that close the gap.”

Other measures previously suggested by AWARE to narrow the pay gap include for companies to disclose pay data at all levels, disaggregated by gender and ethnicity, and to index jobs by scope instead of by workers’ last-paid salaries, which entrenches disparities.

Visit the “Donate Your Gender Pay Gap” campaign at give.asia/donateyourgenderpaygap.

* Singapore’s adjusted pay gap, which measures different pay for equivalent work—without capturing the other differences in men and women’s employment circumstances that produce inequality—was 4.3% in 2020.

** AWARE arrived at this figure based on median gross monthly income figures, differentiated by age and sex, published by the Ministry of Manpower at stats.mom.gov.sg/iMAS_PdfLibrary/mrsd_2020LabourfForce.pdf

Annex: How we identified Pay Gap Day

Say a man (M) makes $10,000 per annum, or roughly equivalent to $27.40 per day. In this scenario, a woman (W) would be making $8,560 per annum or $23.45 per day.

While M would work 365 days to earn his $10,000, W would work $10,000/$23.45, or approximately 426 days, to make $10,000. That is 61 days more than M.

That extra 61 days means W has to work from 1 Jan, 2022 – 2 March, 2023 to earn the same amount as M who works from 1 Jan – 31 Dec, 2022.