Reflective journal 3

       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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