People

Holding up half the heaven
Girls starting to beat the boys in fields they used to dominate, good for the economy, not for family. By Seah Chiang Nee.
Nov, 2, 2000

In the centre of one of Singapore's private estates, 19 teenage girls huddled over some moon-cakes and egg tarts in their school lab, testing a new food preservative sent them by a multinational food company.

All aged 15, they are biology students in a biotechnology programme in Cedar Secondary School, the first to have a link-up with a private company.

Life Sciences are, of course, Singapore's new pillar of growth, whose output is expected to double to S$12 billion in four years' time. The government is investing S$2 billion to attract world-class research and development companies here.

For the Cedar girls, all this is, of course, above their league, but the girls want an early start.

For the moment what these Secondary 3 students wanted was to test the effectiveness of the new preservative on eight local food. It was not only just the best and brightest who were chosen for the task, but all who were doing the course.

Earlier this year, three all-girls schools, Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, St Nicholas and Cedar - won top places in an international web-site competition in which 100 schools from all over the world took part.

These are Singapore's third generation girls, children of baby boomers (born after World War Two) - ambitious, articulate, and more than able to hold up half today's high-tech sky.

They are in their teens and early-20's, most of them in schools and universities, busily building new trends and breaking old myths.

Do anything but just don't tell them that they'll never beat the guys in science or engineering or that women are lousy with computers. They'll laugh to your face.

The fact is that, unlike their mothers, they are moving comfortably into the new economy, which favours high tech services over physical stamina.

And I'll let you on to a little secret that many Singaporeans still don't know.

These third generation girls are improving by leaps and bounds in the field of knowledge, fast catching up - and even surpassing - the boys in some of the fields the latter had once dominated in.

Actually Singapore is not alone in this.

Recently, Britain announced to a shocked nation that the girls were repeatedly faring better than the boys in both the "O" and "A" level exams. The government wants a national survey to find out why.

A couple of months ago, I was invited to give a talk on effective communication to business undergraduates and had a glimpse of the new phenomenon.

Some 30 students had turned up, two-third of them girls. Confident and hungry for knowledge, these campus ladies were asking most of the questions and, satisfactorily for me, kept the session on and on way past schedule.

The statistics are impressive. As in America, more Singaporean women - almost 55% - go to university than men. It's nothing to do with national service. In Malaysia, the ratio is exactly the same - 55-45.

Some 51.1% of Singaporean women are working, close to trends in other advanced societies.

Unlike their mothers, who had toiled as factory hands, typists, sales-girls or waitresses, the majority of today's ladies are doing very different work.

Each year some 10,000 women are spilling out of universities and polytechnics to take up higher-skilled jobs. They are bright, dynamic and vibrant. They are doing swimmingly well in this information age.

The higher education is reflected in their income.

Five years ago, 113,400 women were earning $2,000 or more a month. Today, this figure has jumped 146% to 279,000 Today the proportion of women who holds professional or managerial positions is 35 per cent, compared to 29 per cent in 1995.

A generation ago, Science was a boy's domain.

In the late 1940s, for example, when I was in "pre-university", no more than 6 or 7 out of a class of 40 Science students were girls. These days, they make up roughly half the class.

"They are better in certain skills, more focused and harder working," explained a professor at a local university.

They speak and write better, and as a result, are cutting an equally large, if not bigger, piece in careers like law, finance, business, pharmacy, accountancy and the media.

The boys, however, remain ahead in such fields as Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Medicine and Science. Even in these, the gap is narrowing.

Beating the Guys in Engineering?

Easy! In the past two years, a number of girls have smashed their ways into record-breaking headlines in male-dominated fields.

At the Institute of Technical Education (ITE), they swept all three of this year's Tay Eng Soon Scholarships this year - the first time since the award was started six years ago.

They are now doing diploma courses at polytechnics - one studying Interior Architecture and Design, another, Electronics, Computer and Communications and the third, accounting.

In September, Lim Chiew Yen became the first woman to have ever topped the electrical engineering course at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), beating a field of 684, three-quarters of them men.

Last year, Janet Kan scored a similar feat, in mechanical engineering, gaining First Class Honour. In engineering, for example, they made up only one in eight of the first-year students in 1990. In 1998, it was one in three. Major Lim Sok Bee 36, made history recently when she became the first woman commanding officer of a combat unit in the army. In 1999 Major Tay Poh Ling, 33, became the first woman to be given command of a naval war ship. At the same time, the police announced its woman commander of a division.

Recently three Singaporean women and a man returned battered and blistered after braving the elements in one of the world's toughest expedition races in Sabah. It involved a grueling 500-km journey that took 12 days of trekking, sailing, canoe-paddling, cycling and walking to complete.

Then Elaine Chua, 22, quit her job here to navigate the globe for 10 months in the world's toughest yacht race - the BT Global Challenge - just for charity. The journey will cover 30,000 miles.

Some men are feeling the heat of competition. There are more complaints that national service is pulling them back in the job market. Some are suggesting the girls be called up for two and a half years as well.

The emergence of Women Power has, of course, its flip side. It has come to mean strains in the family, marriage break-ups, neglected children and juvenile delinquency.

Since more girls are becoming as goal-oriented as the boys, they are also exposed to the same pressures from young, the need to do well in exams and later, at work and business.

Over the past decade, juvenile delinquency has been trending upwards before coming down in the past couple of years. While the number of wayward boys is reaching a plateau, the rate for girls is increasing.

In fact, girls now make up two-thirds of cases of children beyond parental control - 67 per cent last year, compared to 59 per cent in 1995.

In one of her early social receptions when she was posted to Washington as Singapore's ambassador, Prof Chan Heng Chee was asked whether the republic regarded relationship with the US as important.

It is a question diplomats are often asked, but in this case, Prof. Chan believes, it masked the questioner's real curiosity, which was: "Why is your country sending a woman to such an important post?"

It is not surprising. Many people are still under-rating the potentials that women, especially the teens, have in the new high-tech economy.

Seah Chiang Nee