How can people live the lives they want? Now that I have laid claims about what people want from life, another, more precise, way to ask the question is this: what conditions enable people to encounter social belonging and respect, to have capacities to exercise choice, autonomy, and ethical agency?
Enabling conditions: principles
Let us consider the mothers I interviewed. First, we must acknowledge and embrace that women do not all have the same preferences. This is the case even when we narrow our focus to mothers. That is the point of thinking in terms of choices, autonomy, ethical agency, instead of specific arrangements of work and care. Some mothers prefer to take time off when their children are born and then return to work when babies are old enough to be cared for by others. Some would like to spend more years primarily caring for young children. Some women value what they do at work and prefer not to give it up after children.
At present, many mothers have limited options—they continue to work because they would otherwise have no income for their families; they quit their jobs because their children have no other caregivers; they fold down their own aspirations because there is otherwise insufficient time to supervise their children. They do all this in response to some combination of policies, familial constraints, and social norms. To exercise choice and agency, women need real options that span a range of possibilities, which allow for more alignment between preferences and practices. We can call these options only if they are all rewarded with dignity and meeting of material needs, and insofar as opportunity costs—particularly regarding security, social belonging, and respect—of some were not much more than others.
It is important to underscore that although choices appear to be taken in singular instances of time, the need for choice and agency in life is a continuous one. Options have to be regarded for their long-term consequences, including how they affect choice and agency later on. Again, this is not to suggest that people should have endless open doors available to them throughout life; no reasonable person expects this. Instead, it is to highlight that many women are offered ‘choices’ that may look alright at one point but are actually problematic over the long term. The ‘choice’ of quitting one’s job at age 29 has to be considered not just for what it does at that point—for example, free up one’s time to care for a baby; instead, we must also recognise that this looks like a quite different sort of choice if at age 36, this same person—still relatively young—encounters difficulties getting a job, pursuing a career, attaining financial independence and security.
In principle, then, social conditions can be said to be enabling if they have these qualities: some range of options that speak to variant preferences and needs; these options are each valued, recognised, and rewarded; they cannot be punishing either in the short- or long-term.
To this list, I will also add: options must be accessible to everyone—not just women, not just the university-educated, and not just the high-income. The current situation of inequality—where some women’s choices are valorised and valued while other women’s choices are judged and frowned upon; where men have one set of choices and women have another—must be disrupted through breaking the connection between class background and gender on the one hand and options on the other. If, as I have argued, the true realisation of ethical agency depends on social recognition, this can only come about when all choices are respected and when everyone’s choices are respected.
How will a range of options be made accessible to all mothers, in ways that do not simply mean the displacement of care labour from some women (with more money and power) to other women (with less)? Care labour must be valued differently than it currently is. We have to re-draw the balance sheet between wage work/income on the one side and the tasks associated with the care of children (or the elderly and disabled) on the other.
To consider how, it is worthwhile reiterating a point feminist scholars have been making for a long time: labour designated only to women tend to be undervalued labour—dismissed as unskilled, trivial, inconsequential; on the other hand, labour monopolised by men tend to be valorised as more difficult, serious, consequential. For care to be valued differently in society, the tethering of care labour to women and the gendering of care as ‘feminine’ need to be disrupted. The juxtaposition of care as secondary or inferior to employment/money/career—where these are to an extent gendered ‘masculine’—has to be dislodged as well. Put more concretely, both men and women must be able to freely partake in both care labour and wage work. The right to work and the right to care should not be limited to one group or the other. That is the only way to de- gender both—to bring into being and hence into imaginations that these are human activities and everyone can do both or either.
Simultaneously, precisely because the current organisation of care labour today is essentially a gendered displacement—from mothers to female domestic workers, female childcare teachers, female nannies—that also builds upon and extends class inequalities, we cannot neglect attending to how paid care work is recognised and caregivers compensated for their labour. For care work to be valued differently, it also must be paid for differently—not merely with ‘appreciation’ and ‘gratitude’ but also with fair wages and work conditions.
These are not issues that can be resolved at the individual level. Individuals cannot alter the conditions that reproduce gender or class inequalities and dynamics. Absent of a range of options, individuals take the ones typically accessible to their gender and class. Doing so tends to reify existing gendered and classed patterns; this occurs even though many women today want to have wage work while raising children and some men want to be more present as caregivers than their own fathers were.
Enabling conditions: principles X policies
Policies can pave the way for shifting conditions to better match various aspirations and needs. We know this from a large body of international research, from which we can distill some ideas of best practices.
What sorts of policies enable the combination of work and care for parents? What kinds of policies can shift care labour away from being only women’s work? What types of policies are necessary to enable parents across class backgrounds to combine employment and parental duties?
First, policies must address both work conditions and care infrastructure. For example, parental leave throughout childhood; wage replacement (i.e. leave has to be paid) for all types of workers (full- or part-time; permanent or contract); protection of workers against excessive work hours, irregular schedules, and unfair dismissal; high quality care institutions and affordable paid care services accessible to all children throughout the childhood years.
Second, policies must pay special attention to addressing gender and class inequalities and not presume that these will magically resolve on their own. Paternity and maternity leaves need to be relatively balanced so that parents, particularly at the beginning of parenthood and early in their careers, do not get entrenched in gendered patterns of care and gendered patterns of employment. Anti- discrimination measures need to be in place to ensure that women and/or low-wage workers who are parents are not discriminated against at the workplace. Regulations around paid time-off; maximum work hours; living wages and benefits; rights to negotiation over work schedules, are especially important for ensuring that the job conditions of part-time and contract workers, including low-wage workers, enable people to both maintain employment and have family lives. The improvement of work-life harmony for parents should not be subsidised by paid caregivers—given the expansion of this sector, not just for care of the young but also the elderly, attention must be given to improving wages and work conditions here.
One can look at policies in Singapore today and claim they check all the boxes. But form is not content and the proof of a pudding is in the eating. We know box-checking is inadequate because we see these interconnected empirical realities: the persistence of gender and class patterns and inequalities in the workplace and the home; the spectacular failure of four decades of pronatalist policies to reverse low fertility trends; and, as I have described in my work over the years and in this essay, the unease and frustrations experienced by ordinary people as they live their lives.
Perhaps we need to look at the policy approaches I described above from a different angle. Without implying that specifics are unimportant, the puzzle of why a case can check all boxes and yet not actually be effective in meeting its goals (I’m assuming the goals of pronatalist policies is to increase fertility) may be better answered by a think on fundamental values. The policy approaches listed above, which exist to different degrees in different places and is nowhere perfect, rests on a few key principles.
First, rights—people have them, states have obligations to respect them, and dignified lives depend on having a confluence of rights. For example, people have parental rights to care (and children have rights to be cared for) as well as worker rights to decent work. Second, inequalities are not natural phenomena. Mitigating inequalities requires understanding sites and mechanisms of unequal treatment and access, and then targeted solutions to redress past and present injustices, including those that have become systematised in institutional practices. Third, how care needs are resolved have consequences for societal wellbeing—how well or poorly children, the elderly, and the disabled are cared for, how caregivers carry out their care duties, have effects on economy, society, polity. Care is an important social function and affects everyone at some point in their life course, but it has limited commercial value. It therefore requires public investment and coordination and must be conceived as a public good. Finally, running through these three principles is belief regarding what members of society owe each other—a sense that society is held together by ties of mutual obligations.
Contrast the list to the principles the Singapore government has been articulating explicitly and embedding in its approach to social policies for several decades: self-reliance; family as the first line of support; many helping hands. It is in many ways directly oppositional: no one has a ‘right’ to anything—you have something if you or your family can acquire it through your own participation in the market. Inequalities are natural outcomes (of unequal capacities/talents/hard work, or more vaguely, ‘globalisation’) and are problems for society only at its extremes—then, the ‘many helping hands’ of ‘community’ (i.e. non-profits/charities) step in before the state intervenes as a last resort. In this schema, there is little room for recognising interdependencies and contemplating shared fates (of childhood, old age, illness) among the people who inhabit a society, no sense that pooled resources can serve the collective wellbeing and benefit people at different points in their life course. In fact, what is implied is that tapping on public resources is parasitical, damaging behaviour that should be avoided as well as discouraged. ‘Personal responsibility’ trumps ‘mutual obligations.’
Although we usually see the principles as applying to ‘welfare’ narrowly conceived (i.e. poverty relief), the Singapore state has been faithful to them more generally, and certainly on issues of care. Foreign domestic workers were the initial policy solution, put forth in the late 1970s, and for a long time the main answer the state had to offer to meet care needs. This set the tone for relegating care problems to individual women, as well as naturalising in care relations and arrangements, intersecting gender, class, and racial hierarchies and inequalities. A ‘market’ and demand-supply dynamics of a specific sort were set up through regulations: on the supply side, the workers must be women, only from certain countries and hence ethno-national backgrounds; the workers are permanently transient—with no rights to citizenship or family unification; they are workers required to reside at their workplace and with limited protections on job scope and work hours.
On the demand side, the ‘market’ was also deeply managed in ways that perpetuate different options along gender and class lines: only households above certain income levels can hire domestic workers; women are the default employers; costs are differentially state-supported through taxes/reliefs depending on alignment with the state’s vision of ideal family structure. To understand how all this could have solidified patterns, we should also note what did not happen. Between the 1970s and through the 2000s, even as the care gap problem grew in intensity as more women entered the workforce, the Singapore state was slow to invest in care institutions and reticent in regulating work to respond to the changing profile and needs of the workforce. This was a length of time sufficient to entrench beliefs and habits around domestic and care labour.
The result is unsurprising: housework and care labour are, in practice and therefore also in people’s minds, low-status, feminine labour. Men have not stepped up in the domestic sphere in the ways women have stepped up in the earning sphere. Women, including those who can afford paid care, remain responsible for resolving care needs, and this impedes their workplace advancements. Importantly, the issue of reconciling work and care, although widely shared and a consequence of significant social transformations, is a private problem to be sorted out by individual families and usually by ‘the woman.’ If this was not enough to entrench care labour as women’s work, the significant expansion of maternity leave in tandem with the snail’s pace movement on paternity leave over these same decades sealed the gap between mothers’ and fathers’ abilities to care as well as their capacities to pursue wage work.
What do ordinary people want? Choice and autonomy, belonging and respect, ethical agency. The current policy regime does not adequately enable these. Above all, the discussion in this section suggests that enabling conditions cannot be created merely by tinkering on the edges of programmes and schemes. What we need is reorientation of the principles embedded in policies—away from an individualistic and market-focused ethos and toward values of equality and mutual care.
Teo You Yenn is Associate Professor and Provost’s Chair in Sociology at the Nanyang Technological University.
This is an excerpt from “Ordinary People Dream”, a chapter in Why Not? Thinking about Singapore’s Tomorrow, edited by Kanwaljit Soin and Margaret Thomas, and published by World Scientific. The book is available in all Kinokuniya stores, and at Book Bar.
