Women executives still rare all around the world

On September 14^th, the Straitstimes published an article, which presents some female executives who spoke at the Women’s Forum Singapore. This Forum, taking place from September 12 to 14^th, aims at introducing female perspectives into the cooperate world and establishing the impact female leading figures can have. In this article several women executive mention the importance of direct superiors, usually male, who encouraged and supported them in getting to an executive position. Especially in focus is Ms Balaka, who had to convince several male distributors and clients of her firm of both her competence and ability to do the job. Now, as senior female executive, she spoke at the Women’s Forum about challenges in this journey.

Highlighting a very different aspect of the Women’s Forum, after already engaging with this event (https://seasia.yale.edu/news/womens-forum-singapore-four-start-winners, https://seasia.yale.edu/news/womens-forum-singapore-september-12-14) this article caught my attention by highlighting a different aspect of the event. Enabling successful women to share their experiences and especially obstacles with younger women, e.g. the ones winning the Start-Up contest, seems very important to me. It is a presentation of overcoming these obstacles and finding ways to perform confidence, while still recognising injustices and structural inequalities in today’s corporate world.

However, I could not avoid to notice that this article, voluntarily or not, highlights and reaffirms a very traditional gender stereotype: that women need men’s help to be successful and reach the top. I, by no means, want to deny that this is structurally necessary, but I did notice that a large emphasis was spend on the importance of male superiors and the large role they played in these women’s lives, as inspiration, mentor or simply by employing them. In a way, for me, this decreases the autonomy of the women and denies them the ability to have achieved their success by own means. It, additionally, reaffirms a hierarchy between the genders.

After reading several of these articles, I have gotten the feeling that the way the Straitstimes manages to report on an event, specifically aiming to improve women’s standing, while still reproducing gender stereotypes. This might reveal some tendencies present in contemporary Singaporean structures.

Source: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/gender-bias-biggest-hurdle-for-women-execs

For more information about the Forum: http://www.womens-forum.com/

See earlier Articles: https://seasia.yale.edu/news/womens-forum-singapore-four-start-winners, https://seasia.yale.edu/news/womens-forum-singapore-september-12-14