Advocacy Successes
General
Women in politics and GE2020
i) Women in politics: two panels
On 18 March, a few months before the 2020 General Election, AWARE held an exciting and insightful discussion with three Parliamentarians: Nominated Member of Parliament Anthea Ong, Member of Parliament Sylvia Lim and Member of Parliament Tin Pei Ling, with Anita Kapoor as the moderator. The event took place at The Projector and was attended by 80 audience members. The panellists spoke at length about their reasons for joining politics, their difficulties balancing work with caregiving and the discomforts of public scrutiny. They were also full of encouragement for young women interested in entering politics.
Due to the popularity of the event, a second session was held online (on 27 November) as part of AWAREFest. This time, the speakers were MP Carrie Tan, MP He Ting Ru, NMP Hazel Poa and Red Dot United candidate Liyana Dhamirah.
ii) Gender Equality Manifesto
With GE2020 in full swing in late June, we also published a Gender Equality Manifesto: a collection of six overall principles for a more equal, fair and just world. AWARE’s manifesto served as a complement to those released at the same time by competing political parties in Singapore. It urged policy-makers to: eradicate discrimination, ensure decent work for all, end violence against women, better support low-income households to meet basic needs, treat parents equally regardless of marital and citizenship status, and financially compensate and equally distribute unpaid care work within families. The manifesto’s influence in Parliament remains to be seen, but it did net 53,739 impressions across AWARE’s social media platforms.
Budget 2020
For our 10th annual submission to the national Budget, we submitted a policy wishlist centred on better support for family caregivers. It was the first time we had worked together with 50 members of the public to co-create policy recommendations for submission, reflecting a strong interest and desire from the community for caregiving issues to be put on the national agenda. Some of the recommendations in the wishlist were eventually picked up by Parliamentarians who included them in their speeches and/or Budget cuts.
We continued to work with Nominated Members of Parliament to raise gender-related advocacy points during the Budget debates. In 2020, topics included migrant domestic workers, residency for transnational spouses, the gender pay gap, workplace harassment and campus sexual violence.
The 2020 Budget included enhancements to the Silver Support Scheme: Payout levels and household monthly income per person criteria were increased from January 2021. In our 2017, 2018 and 2019 Budget recommendations, we had called for Silver Support to be made more inclusive and effective by increasing the level of payout to match average monthly basic expenditure of households, and to remove “housing type” as an eligibility criteria for HDB flat dwellers. We are encouraged by these changes.
International submissions
We also contributed to global advocacy for women’s human rights, submitting reports on how COVID-19 had affected women and domestic violence rates in Singapore to the World Bank and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In addition, we joined a coalition of 11 civil society organisations to submit a joint report to the United Nations, as Singapore prepares for its third Universal Periodic Review (UPR) scheduled for 2021. That report touched on the suppression of civil and political rights, the persistence of discrimination, the inadequate national response to climate change and other issues.
Gender in Singapore advertising
Teaming up with marketing consultancy R3 Worldwide, we embarked on a project to examine gender portrayal in Singapore advertising by analysing 200 television ads broadcast in Singapore between 2018 and 2020. With an eye to persuading local advertisers to think more critically about their depictions of gender, we awarded top marks to ads by Vaseline, Singtel, Apple, Dove and a select few other brands. Our findings on gender representation, gender roles, stereotypes and beauty standards were covered in Marketing Magazine, The Drum, Campaign Asia-Pacific, a TODAY letter and an in-depth commentary in Rice Media.
Toxic masculinity
On 21 July, AWARE held a virtual panel discussion entitled Good boys, softbois, sammyboys, boys will be boys: learning and unlearning toxic masculinity. Moderated by Shailey Hingorani, the panel featured the speakers Keeshan “Shan” Menon, Kristian-Marc James and Tan Wah Kiat, and saw almost 200 attendees.
The discussion covered the complexities of being a man today and navigating different types of masculinities. It shed light on how toxic masculinity (stereotypically “male” attitudes or behaviours that have negative impacts on members of society) manifests in one’s personal life, workplace and other spaces—and how we can try to combat it.
Audience members loved the session, telling us later that “the panel was well-informed… it wasn’t too jargon-y and was ‘layperson’ enough for people who are new to the discussion to relate”, and “it opened my eyes to how toxic masculinity affects us as a culture and how ingrained it is in our society.”
AWARE in the media
