What challenges do women face when returning to work after a career break?

Koh Yan Ping (0:01)

Best of Live Well, featuring Lance Alexander.

Lance Alexander (0:05)

A new study by the Singapore Council of Women's Organisations follows women through the return to work journey. From the reasons they left to the barriers they met when they tried to get back to work. The study also examines why existing support does not always lead to a job. So what can we do to make it easier for women to return and stay in the workforce? Koh Yan Ping, the CEO of Singapore Council of Women's Organisations, and she joins us now. Yan Ping, great to have you here this morning.

Koh Yan Ping (0:42)

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Lance.

Lance Alexander (0:44)

Your study is based on focus groups with women who have taken career breaks. How many women did you follow and what did you want to understand from them?

Koh Yan Ping (0:55)

Very happy that I get to talk about this study because the whole women coming back to work topic, the issues surrounding women's workplace challenges, I think it's something that we've always been talking about in our society.

But in this study, which we did actually also in collaboration with the NTUC Women and Family, we called it the women's returning journey, the reentry journey, and then we looked at the various paths and the various obstacles and challenges. What can we do about it? So we spoke to 120 women in a focus group discussion that was done across a period of close to a month, and they were done in small focus groups of about six each. So we had a total of 20 groups of women that we spoke to, and they come from different age groups, different backgrounds. We spoke to those who are just coming back from maternity leave. We spoke to those who have taken a break of, let's say, three to five years. We've spoken to women who are slightly more senior, 50s and above, 50 to 65, who also have taken a break and are also again now looking at coming back. And most interestingly, we spoke to this last group of women who have attempted to come back, but were not successful. So they've been facing challenges in coming back. So this whole group of women, we spoke to them. We also looked at it from the lens of PMEs and non-PMEs, because again, the challenges and the requirements, the needs will be very different. So the overall study then was again complemented by another survey that we did online with another 500 women, 502 women. And again, that supplemented a lot of the experiences and the barriers that these women were going through in their journey of coming back to work.

Lance Alexander (2:35)

Okay, you found that many women tried other options before saying, look, I have to resign.

What was tried? And why did those arrangements not work for them?

Koh Yan Ping (2:46)

So when we spoke to all these women, one common thing that keeps coming back to us is that it was a decision that they had to weigh in and discuss extensively before coming to the decision to say that, hey, I'm going to take a break or I'm going to leave my job.

And why? Because obviously a lot of the women, before they have to make that decision, they will try to make things work. I mean, we women, we always put ourselves up to it and say, hey, let's see what I can do with this issue. I mean, if I have a challenge, let's see how I can try to juggle both. And this whole idea of juggling work and caregiving responsibilities, I think it's so common. It's so common. We see that in our families and our friends and everywhere. Our colleagues are doing it. But so they always try their best to see whether they can accommodate whatever the demands of their work with the demands of the family.

Of course, these days we have the norm now for flexibility in the workplace. I mean, we have flexible arrangement, which is much more common these days than compared to a couple of years ago before the pandemic. So, that to us was a good direction, a good shift in the needle a little bit in how we accept flexibility as a norm. And that has helped a lot of women in the sense that then they have access to this flexibility, they can better try to manage their time around these conflicting demands. But at the end of the day, it is not sustainable for some of them because at the end of the day, flexibility, if you have it as a workplace policy, is good. But do you really have it in practice? So, that was a deeper question that we need to ask, and that was surfaced through the focus group as well, that they may have it in the company policy, but do you really have free access to flexibility? And whether your workplace culture, your direct supervisor, your managers, honestly supports you in the flexibility?