Singapore's Hidden Workplace Bias Against Women Revealed

In 2020, Khatija Aslam walked out of a job interview convinced she had performed well. She had been headhunted, she had relevant experience, and she had been candid from the outset about returning from maternity leave with two children under two. The feedback, when it arrived, was almost surgical in its assumptions. The headhunter relayed that the interviewer felt the role might not suit her “personal circumstances,” given the long hours and extensive travel involved. Nobody had asked Khatija whether she could travel. The conclusion had simply been drawn.

That moment of institutional presumption — quiet, deniable, structurally embedded — became the seed of something larger. Khatija began researching what she had experienced and encountered the concept of the “leaky pipeline”: the well-documented phenomenon whereby women exit at every successive rung of the career ladder, with attrition accelerating precisely between mid and senior levels. Over fifty per cent of women, she found, drop off at that particular threshold. Those are, not coincidentally, the years when caregiving responsibilities tend to peak — young children, ageing parents, the compounding weight of domestic logistics that workplaces rarely price into their expectations.

She eventually secured a role in innovation marketing at a New Zealand-based fresh food company, then took a year’s sabbatical in 2022 before returning in a job-sharing arrangement at two-and-a-half days per week. The sabbatical gave her time to think more carefully about the structural dimensions of what she had observed. Women were not simply making individual choices to step back. They were responding rationally to systems that had been designed, consciously or not, around a different kind of worker — one without caregiving obligations, one whose availability was unconditional.

In 2023, she founded Moxy, a platform built to surface the workplace experiences of women across Asia and translate them into actionable intelligence for the organisations that employ them. The model rests on two data pillars. The first, Moxy Movement, invites women to share anonymous, unfiltered accounts of their experiences with workplace equality and flexibility through an open-access insights page. To date, nearly a thousand women across 168 companies have contributed, with Singaporean respondents accounting for seventy-four per cent of the dataset. The aggregated findings are published on a public dashboard, making visible patterns that individual HR departments might otherwise miss or minimise.

The second pillar, Moxy TableInsights, operates at the organisational level. When companies engage Moxy directly, small groups of female employees share experiences in their own words, respond to workplace scenarios and identify where they believe change is most urgently needed. The data is anonymised and aggregated before being returned to the company as a collective diagnostic. Moxy has now worked with around twenty organisations spanning financial services, asset management, insurance, consumer goods and sports. The stories that emerge are specific and telling. One single mother described attending a conference dinner with sixteen male colleagues, watching them bond afterwards at an event she could not join because her children needed to be collected. “No one’s excluding me,” she said. “It’s just the reality of the situation.” Another working mother found that every time she raised interest in a secondment opportunity, colleagues asked what she planned to do about her child — a question, she noted, that framed her primarily as a parent rather than as a professional.

The diagnostic process does not stop at qualitative data. Moxy layers the narrative findings with a quantitative follow-up survey covering career progression, leadership support, equal voice in meetings, flexibility and benefits. The resulting report identifies both the gaps and the interventions — short and long-term — that companies can execute. In one global consumer goods company, the clearest finding was that women possessed genuine ambition and appetite for growth, but the infrastructure supporting that growth — mentorship, sponsorship, access to opportunity — was informal, inconsistent and therefore inequitably distributed. Based on Moxy’s recommendations, the company is now rolling out structured sessions to help women articulate requests for sponsorship and introducing inclusive leadership training for managers.

Moxy also offers TableTalk, a collaborative game played in groups of eight to ten, designed with a behavioural psychologist and game designer. Each group receives a female character card whose life unfolds through a sequence of positive and negative events. The team’s task is to build the best possible story for her — a mechanism that allows participants to explore difficult workplace scenarios through narrative distance rather than direct confrontation. Over a thousand people across organisations have played it. The format matters because the conversations it generates are ones that rarely happen in performance reviews or town halls.

The data Moxy has gathered points to structural failures that are specific and measurable. Four in ten working women would prefer part-time work if they had the choice, yet fewer than three per cent of companies in Singapore offer job-share arrangements. That gap is not a talent pipeline problem. It is a supply-side failure — a culture that has not yet reckoned with the mismatch between what workers need and what employers are willing to design. Khatija is direct about it: “That’s a culture problem.” Equally stark is the finding on promotion processes. Only one in five women believes the promotion process in her organisation is fair, transparent and unbiased. Opacity in advancement criteria does not affect all employees equally; it tends to disadvantage those who are already less embedded in informal networks of sponsorship and visibility.

What Khatija returns to, repeatedly, is the role of middle management. Inclusion strategies debated at board level or embedded in diversity and inclusion frameworks rarely reach the lived experience of most women in the way that a single line manager does. Whether a flexible work request is processed fairly, whether a woman’s ambition is read as an asset or a complication, whether her contributions are amplified or quietly sidelined in meetings — these outcomes are shaped by the person sitting directly above her. Allyship, in this reading, is not a soft cultural aspiration. It is a structural mechanism, and its absence at the middle layer of an organisation undermines whatever commitments are made at the top.

Pakistani by origin, Khatija was born in Malaysia and moved to Singapore roughly twenty years ago to study product design at the National University of Singapore. She has lived here since and holds Singapore citizenship. She now has three daughters — aged eighteen months, six and eight — and continues to split her working week between the fresh food company and Moxy. She describes the simple act of submitting feedback as something women have found “incredibly empowering.” That observation is worth sitting with. The empowerment is not incidental to the methodology; it is part of what Moxy is producing. Data, in this context, is not only an instrument for corporate decision-making. It is also a form of recognition — evidence that the experiences women have been quietly absorbing are real, are shared, and are worth examining with precision.