Empowering Women to Succeed Takes All of Us

With International Women’s Day this week, one has many opportunities to reflect on the progress we might have seen in our lifetime. One of my recurring thoughts is what my mother might have thought of the progress if she was still alive.

The one thing I remember as a child was this Chinese calligraphy pasted on the wall near the tear-away calendar. This positioning meant we saw this character every day as we ripped the previous day’s page away. It was the character 忍 – to persevere or endure. Mandarin characters are meaningful pictograms and the word illustrated here represents a bleeding knife over the heart. In other words, to endure implies pain and suffering. It implies perseverance against painful odds.

忍 has a negative connotation, especially when enunciated in my mother’s recurrent advice to a stubborn child. When I was younger, I resented this negative reinforcement. It almost always implied that I had to put up with obstacles, accept that the odds were stacked against me or us. That pain and suffering were inevitable. Nay – a given. Live with it, child. 你必须忍受。

As an older child, I began to appreciate why my parents had that character pasted in view every day. We were poor, and we had to make difficult choices regularly. Life was indeed full of obstacles for my parents. I had one meal a day for long periods of time, unless my aunts donated food to us, or until my elder sister got a job waitressing and could come home nightly with leftovers, waking us up at 2 a.m. to eat a second meal. In fact, both my sisters were very bright students but could not continue with higher education. The younger three children – my brothers and I – were luckier as our parents had fewer dependent children to feed and raise as my sisters went to work.

Nonetheless, my mother drummed into me not to be too ambitious – we were too poor to be ambitious. She reminded me constantly that we could only afford mandatory, subsidized education up to age 12 and barely to age 16.

A Good Education is Empowering

So, in junior school, I determined to study very hard to get into the top high school. I was so determined in high school as I knew it would be the highest educational credential to my name. However, I did well enough to get into the top junior college at that time. You might think this was a proud moment for my mother. Instead she was worried. It meant two years of opportunity cost if I didn’t start working. I convinced her that two extra years of higher education would get me better pay, and I was working part-time anyway to contribute. I knew this was a bonus and was very engaged in my studies. I topped my junior college in English Literature. I could enroll in university!

There was mild panic.

My teachers asked my mother to attend the prize-winning ceremony. But she would not attend. My two brothers were already in university and my father unwell. She couldn’t afford a third child in university, scholarship or not. It took a lot to get her there, and thankfully, counsellors gave us advice on applying for a scholarship. It was a bilingual panel of interviewers for 800 students. I was awarded one of the four scholarships, largely on the basis of our circumstance as well as my academic performance. The prestige persuaded my mother to let me continue.

I enrolled into university, promising my parents I would be working while studying. My father hadn’t been well since I was six. It did help that he was warded in two hospitals close to my campus. I juggled work and studies while visiting him daily. Then something seminal happened. I did well enough to be awarded a chance at Honours in Literature. This time, my mother flipped. Totally.

No persuasion would move her one smidgen this time. We argued, we fought. We literally stood at the curb of our doorstep and she demanded to know if I intended to carry on the way I had carried on. Without hesitation, I said, “Yes!” As we faced off, she calmly intoned, “If you insist… you are not my daughter.”

Stunned, I responded defiantly, if hesitantly, “Then I am not.”

She didn’t budge. I didn’t blink.

Until she said, “Then why are you still standing here. This is not your home. I do not know you.” She closed the door in my face. That was the end of our truth-or-dare moment.

I left that day with the clothes on my back. My friend put me up and we came up with an elaborate explanation to her parents, who suspected our scheme but more importantly, being of the same generation, surmised the rationale. They fed me, noting how much I could eat and always cooking extra portions! And her mum would call mine to give updates on our academic progress, both careful to play along to save face.

Allies Empower Us

When I started work, I moved to a rented apartment near my parents and visited every day. The steady income I earned as a journalist helped pay for my father’s rising hospital bills, and my mother was grateful though our conflict remained unresolved and unspoken. For all my belligerence, she put up with me. 忍。There was a bleeding knife between our hearts.

Nonetheless in my first year of work, when I became the youngest reporter to win the Story of the Year Award in my media group, it was pretty ho-hum to her. Only after my two brothers (also journalists) told her it was a big deal, and that I was on the front page, did she take note. I was unimpressed. It clearly needed two men’s endorsement for my award to be of note. It was my turn to 忍 – I understood the importance of male endorsement at a young age. I confess I resented it. I had not earned my mother’s recognition as my own right.

(My first job as a reporter with Singapore Business Times.)

A few years later, my father passed on. A few years after that, my mother had a stroke. Incredibly, she staged a remarkable recovery. All our past grievances faded into the background as work took over my life. I also became the first Asian-born, Asian-educated female bureau chief for our region.

However, it was at my mother’s funeral that a casual remark would explode my reality. An aunt mentioned my mother’s famed perseverance and credited her education and work as a teacher. She dropped the bombshell that it was her parents’ foresight to have her educated in the 1930s, her father even piggybacking her to school to overcome prejudice. Somehow, this punctured what veneer of acceptance I had preserved about her. Why, if she was empowered to an education, did she stand in the way of mine?!

The Importance of a Supportive Eco-System

Now, with the hindsight of a long career and many obstacles overcome as a woman, and helpful insights from elder relatives, I have come to terms and made peace with my mother.

I realise now what I didn’t realise then – that as an educated and intelligent woman, my mother was frustrated in having her ambitions and hopes curtailed. She was exhausted.

She, like all of us, wanted a better life. She was hardwired to persevere. She was educated for it. She lived through Japanese Occupation during WWII (where she met my father at work). When my father’s business and then his health failed, she persevered. But societal norms were different in her days. She worked very hard to earn very little and struggled to make ends meet. She was always too thin, malnourished. She was never too proud to accept help and donations of food. And in her own way, she wanted to protect me from life’s disappointments, not to dream too big, not reach too high, to accept the obstacles placed in the way of women. In short, to 忍。

Parity Leads to Social Progress

If there’s a lesson in her life, it is the importance of wage equality and the importance of empowering others to succeed. As the sole breadwinner, it would have meant fairer odds for her children, especially her daughters. The most recent Global Wage Report compiled by the International Labour Organization, covering 70 countries and 80 percent of the wage-earning world population, reveals a 20 percent gender-based wage disparity. Over a 45-year career, that would mean women work an estimated nine years unpaid! I am sure the gap was even wider for my mother’s generation. Just think of the opportunity cost – not just to women, but to families and to economies.

The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2020 benchmarks 153 countries on their progress towards gender equality in four dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival and Political Empowerment. The latest report reveals that the projected time needed to close the gender gap is an astonishing 99.5 years. We cannot wait. Societies would falter. Daughters would slip through the cracks. Innovations will live in theory in a girl's mind. We will fail future generations.

I know now that my mother was trying to protect me, though through flawed assumptions. My generation grew up in a different time, where women have a greater voice. When I was interviewed for my job, and asked how much I expected to be paid, my answer was, “As much as the man you would hire for this job.” I had to repeat myself when the hirer hesitated. 

I constantly remind sympathetic men they need to be male allies for women to be recognized and to succeed. I know I need to affirm women at work because recognition isn't a given. I know my faithfulness to my dream of a good education paid off. I know I need to encourage young girls so they can dream big, aim high and persevere. I believe we can change and must push for change quickly for greater societal impact. It takes all of us – I think of my teachers who advised us, the philanthropists who gave out bursaries and scholarships, my peers who supported me, their families who showed compassion, my aunts who bought us food, and my male colleagues who were in positions of power to help. (Twice in my career, two male bosses fought for exceptional pay raises when they saw the income disparity.)

(Launching a STEM Kit in Istanbul recently, with Rolls-Royce Regional Director for Africa, Middle East & Turkey, Patrick Regis, a strong advocate and ally)

Women’s rights are human rights. Equality cannot wait. Diversity has positive societal impact. But it takes commitment from us.

That is why I am devoted to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) - thank you, Rolls-Royce, for letting me live my dream of empowering children and especially girls. Research shows STEM offers high-paying jobs, which helps advance women further.

That is also why I joined Zonta International, founded a century ago to empower women to achieve their full potential (aviator Amelia Earhart is a famous Zonta alumni). And at Zonta in Singapore, we are devoted to empowering girls’ education through Project Pari. An annual donation of S$800 will put a girl in Project Pari through school in Singapore.

And I am proud to work for Rolls-Royce, which pledged to the 25by2025 campaign by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to raise the representation of women in senior positions to at least 25 percent by 2025, and to report annually on key diversity metrics for accountability.

(A fund-raising dinner by Zonta International in Singapore for Project Pari, to support under-privileged girls to complete their education. I am not showing the girls' photos for privacy reasons.)

I don’t think my mother would have imagined what I could achieve in life. If she was born in a different time, I wonder what she might have achieved. I regret she is not alive to witness the change happening now but I am also grateful that she taught me from a young age to accept that obstacles exist, and I should endure or overcome them.

I am also glad that today I perceive the word 忍 not so much as forbearance but persistence. We should persist. There is no alternative. And we will prevail. Stronger, together.

(As bureau chief for Bloomberg in Indonesia and always keen on aviation!)