Empowerment and Matrimonial Assets : Do Men have the Right in Singapore?

Imagine if you were to bring the Talebans to Singapore and hand to the Taleban the task of allocating the relative number of places in Universities for men and women based on the students’ GCE ‘A’ level examination results. How would you expect the Talebans to do it?
They would want to ensure that only men win and win big. They would stack the cards against women students by manipulating the statistics. How? Well, imagine a point system where :
    (a) the scores for each subject for all students would be totalled up;
    (b) the average score for each subject would be calculated from the total;
    (c) examination results for each boy that exceeded the average in a given subject would be given a weightage of ‘one plus X’ (where X is a fraction depending on how much his score exceeded the average);
    (d) in contrast, examination results for each girl that exceeded the average in a given subject would be given a flat score of ‘one’;
And the Talebans would proudly conclude from such a point system that boys were superior to girls in intellect for this and that subject based on the number of X’s that they calculated. And what about the rest of the subjects? The Talebans would point their rifles at you and declare with a straight face that the score was equal for boys and girls for the other subjects based on the flat ‘ones’ that they calculated. By this reasoning, the Talebans would conclude that boys were superior to girls and more University places should be allocated to boys.
We would have a civil war on our hands. The feminists would be up in arms over the Taleban’s bigotted methodology!

The reader might think that the above scenario is far fetched. And thankfully so. But something similar happened in 2005 at an exhalted and august international organisation – something similar but with the genders reversed. And it is incredible that there is no civil war yet.

In 2005, the World Economic Forum published a report called Women’s Empowerment. The report contained lots of data, tables and charts and load full of scientific sounding statistical concepts. The report concluded at page 16 that :

“True models of gender equality do not exist. Given the lamentable international picture, no one who studies the gender gap can doubt that no country in the world has yet managed to achieve it…. We hope that this work provides the impetus for policy makers to strengthen their commitment to the idea of women’s empowerment, and to concentrate
the political will, energy and resources, in concert with aid agencies and civil society organisations, to make gender equality a reality.”

That was quite an indictment of policy makers across the globe, including that of the United States of America who ranked 22nd in the world behind Sri Lanka (war torn country at that time facing a civil war) and Colombia (country facing drug trafficking gun-totting warlords). Singapore ranked 65th behind the African nations of Ghana, Uganda, Namibia, and Botswana. How did this come about? A clue would be found tossed into the Appendix at page 21 where it was stated that :

“This scale obscured the fact that for some variables several countries have reached or surpased the benchmark of equality. For example, in quite a few countries a higher proportion of girls than boys attend secondary school. According to the previous method, the top performing country Sweden, where there are 1.26 girls to every boy in
secondary school, received a 7, whereas countries that reached equality, such as Korea, received a score of only 3.04.
"In the current index, since all the variables are gap concepts and are calculated as a ratio of female values to male values, each variable is scaled on a 0 – 1 scale where 1 is defined as the equality benchmark. The distribution is truncated at this equality benchmark so that in the previous case, Sweden and Korea each receive a score of 1.”

This clue showed that prior years' reports captured both statistics where women surpassed men as well as where men surpassed women. However, by the time of the 2005 report, only statistics where men surpassed women were captured to support the conclusion that there was no gender equality. This was achieved by neutralising all statistics where women surpassed men – ie truncating such statistics to ‘1’ for equality. This bigotted methodology was a mirror image of the imaginery Taleban story above.

The 2005 methodology hid the true variety in women’s achievements, and more particularly, that in many areas, women surpassed men in their achievements. The bigotted approach adopted by the 2005 report leaves a reader with the suspicion that : if areas where women surpassed men were taken into account with equal weightage, they would balance the other areas relied on by the 2005 report.

An alternative perspective on the true gender statistics might be found in an article entitled Gender Divide : www.warrenfarrell.com . The author observed that women were under-represented in various fields and leadership positions not because of gender discrimination but because (a) women had more life style options – ie more options for better work-life balance; and (b) women had priorities that led them to different paths other than straight up the corporate ladder.

In Singapore, the Women’s Charter was last century’s affirmative action for women based on the gender inequality of the time. Half a century ago, had a gender equality survey been conducted on third world Singapore, there was little doubt that it would have presented a strong case for its affirmative legislation. Half a century later, while the student gender ratio in our Unversities varies from year to year, there is general parity between number of men and women studying in our Universities. There is great doubt whether the Women’s Charter is still needed in first world Singapore today.

Several aspects of the law found wanting has been discussed in various articles within this series on Men’s Rights. What is left is our law relating to matrimonial asssets. In the United Kingdom, Baroness Ruth Deech, a former lecturer on family law at Oxford University has gone on record to say that London had become the divorce capital of Europe because of British Court’s generous awards of marimonial assets to women at divorce. Her observations suggested that while the distribution of matrimonial assets might have been fair between divorcees at the lower end of the economic scale, its application at the upper end of the economic scale was : (a) unfair (disproportionate to the effort put in); (b) demeaning to women (ie to the majority of who were presumably honest and hard working); and (c) encouraged sham marriages (ie by women who married rich men for money). With this forceful indictment of divorce laws in the United Kingdom, it is time for Singapore to examine our own divorce laws.

If you asked Paul, a divorcee who had to transfer his half of the matrimonial home to his ex-wife, whether the law was fair in Singapore, you would be answered with a resounding ‘no’. He would say that the Family Court applied a double standard. True to the spirit of the Women’s Charter to protect women, the Family Court was quick to order Paul to disclose all his bank records, expenses receipts and other records that might trace to hidden assets. But when Paul applied for disclosure of his ex-wife’s records to trace how investment bonus was allegedly paid out by an insurance brokerage company in cash and disappeared (instead of through the banking system), the Family Court was incredulous and asked him why he was tracing the wife’s assets when the main focus should be on his (the husband’s assets). The Family Court declined to order the disclosure.
If you asked Paul, he would also say that the Family Court relied too rigidly on the ideal of a ‘clean break’. The Family Court felt that divorcees should have a clean break from each other’s hold over joint assets. He had lived with his wife and child in a mature estate trying for enbloc sale for several years. The sale was aborted when the economic downturn came. The couple quarrelled over money issues (including the loss of money from property investments) and the intended enbloc sale was all they had left to climb out of their financial mess. He offered to buy the ex-wife’s share of the matrimonial home. The Court played down the possibility of the enbloc sale and ordered Paul to transfer his share in the matrimonial home to his ex-wife. A few years later, the enbloc sale succeeded, and his ex-wife reaped the windfall.
And if you try to placate Paul by saying that the windfall was for the good of his son? In that case, the transfer should be to someone to hold in trust for his son, he would retort.

Ex-husbands fight tooth and nail to prevent their assets from falling into the hands of their ex-wives. But most ex-husbands would fight less if their assets were to fall into the hands of their children. This brings us back to the question whether a Family Charter may be more suitable for today’s Singapore. The Women’s Charter was last century’s affirmative action to protect women. Naturally, the Family Court thought that the best way to protect the interest of the child was for the husband to transfer the matrimonial home to the wife who had care and control of their son. This was done purportedly in the interests of the child. But it’s immediate benefit was the ex-wife. And it generated a lot of unnecessary litigation over distribution of matrimonial assets.

A Family Charter on the other hand will, by its very name, suggest that the legislation is for the interests of all parties. With such legislation, a Family Court may be more interested in the assets of both husbands and wives, and more inclined to transfer a father’s assets/windfall to his children (rather than from ex-husbands to ex-wives).

Finally, with less of a windfall, women may be less ready to head for the divorce court. If a woman could be astounded that her well regarded and well beloved father was unfaithful, -- just like the wife's father in Sex Lies and Videotape -- she might see her unfaithful husband in a better light as well.

Jonathan Lee