Women, The Unsung Heroes

KUALA LUMPUR: Women are truly the unsung heroes with superhuman strength to undertake the role of a wife, mother and home managers.

Minister of Woman, Family And Comunity Development Datuk Seri Hajah Rohani Karin said that, our role is time-consuming and energy-sapping but women who sacrifice career and struggle to meet the challenges as a wife, mother and home managers find it to be a deeply rewarding demands of parenting.

She siad this in her speech at the Lauch Of Carer Comeback Programme Grant For Women at Connexion @ Nexus, Bangsar South earlier today.

Thanking TalentCorp for inviting her to deliver a welcoming address to launch this Career Comeback programme for women, Rohani also congratulates TalentCorp for organizing this programme with the aim to attract talented women who have left the workforce and sacrifice their career to fulfill the traditional gender role of mothering, childcare and managing the houses.

"Article 12 (1) of the Federal Constitution guarantees the right to education for all Malaysians regardless of gender has enabled Malaysian women to gain equal access to education."

"Today, women make up 70 percent of public university enrolment in 2014, the female labour force participation rate stands at 52.4 percent in 2013. This means that almost half of Malaysian women of working age group are not in the labour market and this phenomenon may derail the Government’s target to increase the women participation in workforce to 55% by the end of 2015," she added.

She elaborated that, in a joint study conducted by my Ministry with the cooperation of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the findings found that almost 67 percent of the married women surveyed gave up jobs to look after their children, followed by marriage, and to comply to their husbands’request that they stop working.

"And 63 percent of these women aged between 25 to 39 years old, the golden age where women were at the peak of their careers," she added.

She pointed out that, the greatest tragedy of this unfortunate withdrawal of Malaysian women from the workforce is that it is a one-way and there is no comeback.

"Other countries such as Japan and Korea also experience similar predicament but the female labour participation rate picks up again when these women return to the workforce at a later age."

"Both Japan and Korea illustrates a “double-peaked” pattern of women participation in labour market and the pattern showed a high labour force participation rates prior to marriage, followed by a sharp decline during childbearing years and subsequently a return to the labour force when the children get older."

"In Malaysia, the women do not return to the workforce, causing the female labour force participation rate in our country to be one of the lowest in ASEAN," she said.

Rohani said that women have to take cognizant that changing workforce demographics in our country means that the talent pool will be mostly women and Gen Y therefore, it is imperative that we look into the issues that are major impediments in seeking the work-life balance faced by women.

"The first issue is childcare, and there is a need to ensure that there are enough quality and affordable childcare facilities for women."

"Toward this end, our caring Government provides a grant amounting to RM180,000 for Government departments to establish childcare centre, and launching grant of RM10,000 for private sector to establish childcare centre," she said adding that the Government also provides childcare subsidy of RM180 per month for parents in public sectorearning less than RM1,500 per month.

"The second issue is employer support for women to juggle their home and work responsibilities. Flexible working arrangements, which include part-time work as well as flexible working days, working from home and flexible start and end times, will help not only women with children but all employees manage their work-life balance."

She said that the employers’ support to offer flexible work arrangementswill the way for talented and educated women to continue working and a well-managed flexible work arrangements drive a performance culture which focuses on performance outcomes rather than physical presence at work.

Announcing that her Ministry has implemented flexible working arrangement on 1st March 2015, Rohani said that they believe that such arrangement will allow their officers and staff, especially the women to achieve work-life balance, and reconciling the pull of mothering and the demands of work as career women.

"I strongly believe it will complement the efforts of Government to ensure talented and educated women are retained as productive workforce and partners in contributing to our economic growth and development. I hope more Government departments and private companies will provide such flexible working arrangement to their officers and staff."

Rohani than disclosed that the third issue is the disparity of income as according to 1st Malaysia Human Development Report, even though the women are better educated, they earn less than men at every level of the job spectrum with the male-female disparity is greatest at top-end jobs.

"Therefore, I call upon employers to craft human resource policy and gender equality salary scheme to reduce this disparity in order to attract and retain talented and educated women," she added. - Sarawakiana