Reflective Journal 3: Reflect on the changing roles of women. You may choose to consider how the changing roles of women in society made an impact on you by drawing on examples from China, the United States and/or Singapore.
When I was younger, I always
thought that women are natural born housewives, who were supposed to stay at
home and take care of the children. This was probably due to the influence of
the Hong Kong dramas I watched when I was young. Many of those dramas are set
in ancient China where women are still regarded as an inferior gender and
discriminations against them are still prevalent in society. Other than this,
my family also helped to shape my perceptions of women in this way. My father
is the head of household, while my mother is the kind of traditional housewife
which usually listens to whatever my father says. In my eyes, it just seems to
me that it was natural for women to listen to men in the household since my
mother and father was behaving in that manner.
However, as I grew up, I
realised that this perception of male domination in household was not entirely
true. When I was in primary five, I saw a househusband for the first time. My
friend’s father fetched him back and forth from school every day while his
mother worked outside. Now when I start thinking about it, phenomenon like this
are becoming a trend. In China, 72%
of wives play a role in decision-making in household management and production
and 74.7% in investments and loans concerning the family. The rising power of
women in households, in my opinion, is quite a beneficial thing. Even though
there more and more women working outside and husbands looking after the
household, the majority of households still have women staying in. Therefore,
they are the ones that have better idea of how the household works and
generally will be able to come up with more constructive measures to help the
household.
Other than the change of role in
households, women today are also playing a huge role in boosting our economy.
In China, there are more than 29 million female entrepreneurs which constitutes
around a quarter of the nation’s total. Women in China are also becoming a
purchase powerhouse, especially those under 35. Furthermore, the government are
also pushing for equal employment opportunities for both genders through
various means like setting quotas and etc. Even though this promotes gender
equality in the economic sphere, some of us males may tend to think otherwise. With
the limited amount of jobs, especially those high paying ones, increasing the
number of applicants will greatly reduce our chances to obtain these jobs which
most of us dream to have. Now in school, I am already starting to have this
fear of being overtaken by my female counterparts. Every now and then I hear
stories about how well the females across the road are faring in terms of
academic grades and other areas.
Despite these numerous changes to women’s
status and roles today, some of their roles still remain the same. For example,
women are, and have always been the ones responsible bearing children and
making sure that our population does not decline. However, as women nowadays
enjoy much greater rights than they once used to enjoy, they have prioritised
other aspects in life like career over marriage and having children. Even if
they do have children, it is usually only one or two. This is quite evident in
Singapore’s society as the fertility rate in 2010 is only 1.15.
The impact of low birth rate is very
dire and cause social unrest. Firstly, a low birth rate will definitely result
in an ageing population, which most developed countries like China and
Singapore will be facing in the near future. Secondly, in order to maintain a
country’s productivity, the government needs to bring in foreign workers and
talents as the local replacement rate is far too low. In China, the effects of
ageing population are already very evident. Since most of the families only
have one child, the children are carrying a huge economic burden of taking care
of the livelihood of their parents. As a result, many of them had to move to
other areas which have better jobs prospect and leave their parents alone.
Usually these parents are what we call the “空巢老人”， where they live alone with no one to take care
of them. From the general elections in Singapore last year, we can also observe
the level of unhappiness amongst citizens because they feel that the government
is importing way too much foreign talents into Singapore.
Therefore, even though the roles of women
today are very different from the past, but there are certain sacred roles,
like child bearers, which only they can have due to natural biological
differences. If these roles are not properly carried out, it will affect the
society extensively.
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