Opening Address by Ag Min at SCWO SAGE Summit 2026

Ag Min Jasmin Lau, Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel

1. Good morning everyone.

    

2. I will confess, I am often tired in the mornings. When I started my political journey, I made it a commitment to myself, to send my little boys to preschool every morning. It means many minutes to find the right pair of socks, or the correct stuffed toy to accompany them that day. Then many kisses at the school gate. And then I proceed to think about them throughout the day, while carrying out my official duties.

    

3. I suspect a good number of you understand how this feels. There’s a line I love, from a writer named Elizabeth Stone – “Having a child is like having your heart go walking around outside your body”. We can be giving a speech at a podium, or fully locked-in in a meeting, and some part of us is still keeping watch over our child mentally.

    

4. I don’t think that divided attention is a weakness. . It is one of the more demanding things we carry as women. Many of you have spent years, if not decades, giving yourselves to others first, and building our careers around the edges of that. And today I want to talk about what it takes to make real room for it.

    

5. Women today have more opportunities to study, work and lead than all the generations before us. As Yian San highlighted, the female labour force participation rate has improved steadily over the decade. We are also seeing more women in leadership roles across different sectors.

    

6. We don’t forget who built this up for us. These opportunities were built by women who had far fewer choices themselves, but they worked hard to give their daughters so much more.

    

7. Progress should not only be measured by how many women work or how far they rise, but whether women have genuine choices about work, and whether they have the support to make those choices, at every stage of their lives.

    

8. The reality is that careers today are rarely a straight line.

    

9. For many women, that line bends. Drops off, fades away, comes back a little later. Some may change sectors or start a business; others may step away for a while because of children or ageing parents, before finding her way back to work.

    

10. SCWO’s engagements with women returning to work tell us how hard coming back into the workforce can be. Some do tell me that  they send out countless resumes, with no callback.  They internalise it, some question their value in society. Some are told their experience “does not quite fit anymore” because they have been away too long, employers ask if they still know what the industry needs. And the longer the gap, the harder it is to walk back with confidence.

     

11. A career does not need to be uninterrupted, to be meaningful. I have said before in many interviews that there is no perfect balance between work and family. Every family finds its own rhythm, and that rhythm can change over seasons of life. Our workplaces at this point need to catch up to that reality.

     

12. The Government cannot decide for every woman, the right balance between work, family and caregiving. But we can make the journey easier to walk.

     

    We are strengthening support for marriage and parenthood, as announced at the National Day Rally last month. More childcare leave, so parents get more time with their children when it matters most.

    • We will also do more to encourage Flexible Work Arrangements. This is not just about working from home, it is not a binary, but also about staggered hours, part-time roles or job sharing. Such arrangements can let someone care for an aged parent, or finish a course in the evenings, without having to choose between that and their jobs.

     

    • As AI reshapes jobs across the economy, we also want to help people stay connected to meaningful jobs even as their careers bend. Our Career Conversion Programmes help workers retrain and move into job roles with good longer-term prospects. For those who take the first step, we see that it  sets them on a better path for the remaining of their careers. This matters, for women returning to the workforce after a career break, who often wonder if their skills still count.

     

    • And underpinning all this is fairness. The Workplace Fairness Act, passed last year, makes it illegal to discriminate against someone for their sex, their caregiving duties, or their pregnancy. We are also developing a new Tripartite Standard on Preventing Workplace Harassment.

     

13. These are not separate rows of a checklist. When you put that all together it shows you the direction we are trying to go in.  As our workforce ages, and take on caregiving duties at different life stages, our workplaces will need to evolve too.

     

14. This is not only about supporting women, or parents. At different points in our lives, many of us will need room and support, whether to care for a child, look after an ageing parent, recover from an illness or a personal setback. A good workplace will make space for that, and gives its people the chance to give their best when they can.  The message we are trying to set out to business leaders is that this is good for business too – employers who get this right will find it easier to attract and retain the best talents. As Singapore competes in this changing economy, I believe this becomes part of our edge, not a cost to it.

     

15. But policy alone cannot build culture. MOM’s 2023 Fair Employment Practices Survey showed that only about 29% of employees who faced discrimination at work sought help, a decrease from 35% in 2022.  Most stayed silent out of fear of being marginalised, or worried what it would cost their careers. Somewhere in this room, there may be a woman who stayed silent for exactly that reason. Some of us would have gone through such experiences, but we fear to speak up, perhaps because of a fear of a cost to our careers. This tells us something important – having the right protections on paper is not enough if people don’t feel safe using them.

     

16. So, I am glad that SCWO will be launching a new Workplace Counselling and Support Service.

     

17. Workers who face discrimination or harassment will have somewhere to go – for counselling, and for support finding a way forward. SCWO will reach out, to help people recognise what they are experiencing, how they are feeling, understand their options, and feel more confident coming forward. It is a meaningful addition to the support already out there, and to the broader efforts to make our workplaces genuinely fair and supportive.

     

18. Policy can open the door. Whether it actually works depends on what happens after – at the office, and at home.

     

19. Employers carry real weight here. Flexibility cannot  come with an unspoken career penalty.

     

20. Families matter as well. My husband and I have had to work out repeatedly, who picks the kids, who takes leave when the kids are sick. There are sometimes hard conversations about load sharing, and the primary parent tends to bear a heavy burden of the mental load. But the more that sharing happens in every home, the more room there is for everyone – women and men both – to show up fully, at work and at home.

     

21. We will keep working with partners like SCWO, who hear from women in ways sometimes Government cannot. The Women’s Workforce Re-entry: Challenges, Barriers and Opportunities study by SCWO helped map out where the real gaps are, and all of this is helping to shape shaping how government, employers and community groups work together from here.

     

22. Building on this, I am glad that SCWO is launching its first SCWO CoLab, to test and scale ideas to support women returning to work. Such ground-up efforts help put policy into practice, and we are grateful.

     

23. Each generation of Singapore women has had more opportunities than the one before. Our responsibility is to keep that progress going.  

     

24. Life does not always move in a straight line, and neither will our careers.  A pause should not close doors.

     

25. That is the kind of Singapore I want to build for my sons, and for every woman in this room. One where stepping back does not mean stepping out forever, and where there is always a way to come back in.

     

26. I wish you all a fruitful summit. And to every woman in Singapore still finding her way back, I hope this room and the people in it give her one more reason to believe there's a way. Thank you.