The topic of divorce and marriage was the first thing that struck me during the lecture. In Singapore, the marriage rate (per 1000 unmarried women) decreased from 47.9% in 2002 to 42.6% in 2007. The divorce rate (per 1000 married women) increased from 7.2% in 2002 to 8.3% in 2007 (Statistics Singapore on Marriages and Divorces, n.d.). Another statistic that might put things into perspective is the increase in divorces, from 2,708 in 1987 to 7226 in 2007.
There are a multitude of factors that influence divorce. Religion, rising costs of living, and the difficulties associated with starting a family in Singapore all play a part, but I would argue that the increasing emancipation of Singaporean women has been the greatest factor of all. Women instituted 68% of all non-Muslim divorces in 2007 (Statistics Singapore on Marriages and Divorces, 2007). This suggests that they were likely to have been able to meet their own financial needs, and it also suggests that women experienced more severe unhappiness in a marriage, compared to men.
I’d like to link this to the recent debate on meritocracy. Certain people have been raising concerns that meritocracy in Singapore is not sufficiently discerning, and that this would eventually lead to the validation of elitism (Lydia Lim, 2008). While I am certainly on their side of the debate, I don’t wish to ignore that there have been some very positive results that have occurred because of merit-based practices. Singapore has actively encouraged women to join the workforce, unwilling to cut the country’s talent pool in half by ignoring them. As a result, there is practically no gender bias regarding career competence or innate intelligence here today. I would ask you to examine your personal experience for memories of any trend of explicit or implicit gender discrimination in your conversations with peers. I think that many people (at least those in their 20s) would find it hard to remember a time when stating one’s belief in the superiority of male intelligence was even barely acceptable among one’s peers. It would be most daring to assert such ideas during one’s law, accounting, or social science tutorials, within classrooms that have roughly equal representation of men and women.
Some might argue that faculties like computer sciences and engineering are still largely dominated by men, but I believe most Singaporeans would not find this fact to contradict the largely accepted idea of intellectual equality between both sexes. A woman’s ability to find adequate employment in Singapore is quite high, and this gives her the option to leave an unhappy marriage without worrying about monetary support (Sernau, 2006). The ‘career-minded woman’ is a viable way of life here. Wifehood is not much of a measure of self-worth for a significant number of well-educated young Singaporean women, and this affects marriage, divorce, and childbirth all at once. In other words, they have the means to leave a marriage, they have an ideal of what they want to leave that marriage for, and increasingly, no one is looking down on them for it.
So is this good or bad? I have both close friends and acquaintances who saw seen their parents split up. In most cases, it was the mother who initiated the divorce from abusive or disloyal husbands, and frankly I’m glad that they had the means to do so. Whose voice do we want to listen to on this matter? The government tells us that all this is bad for Singapore’s economy and demographic, and that childbirth is a duty to one’s nation. I nod my head and smile condescendingly. Others say that these factors only give uncommitted, irresponsible spouses an excuse to bail out, and there is a grain of truth in that. But ultimately, I think that for the most part, the increased ability of women to initiate divorces has, for the most part, led to the dissolution of those marriages that were real on paper, but had no real love or respect inside them. Yes, the social turmoil that has resulted is undeniable, but I believe that given time, new generations of men and women will work out new, better ideals of how they want to treat each other as partners, and that marriages will increasingly become founded on respect and common ideals, rather than out of necessity or convenience.
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