ABSTRACT
In 1980, only 27 per cent of Singapore’s households were categorized as being dual-income earning. By 2015, the dual-earner married couples had increased to 53.8 per cent. Among the Malay population, the female labour force participation rate has also increased markedly from 17.9 per cent in 1970 to 47.9 per cent in 2010. However, studies done in the 1980s and 1990s found that despite more married Malay women entering the workforce, the retention of traditional pattern of gender roles, with husbands inclined to do the ‘provider’ roles and wives the ‘nurturing’ roles, seemed to have prevailed. Our study revisits the conditions of present-day Malay households to investigate if there are some newer changes to the gender roles pattern. It has been found that while there are small shifts in practices of sharing household and childcaring tasks in Malay dual-income households, perceptions pertaining to notions of ‘different’ or ‘complimentary’ women’s and men’s work continue to define marital relations within the home. For the Malay family, the exercise of ‘maternal gatekeeping’ and conformity to an ‘Ideal Muslim’ marital couple strongly underpin the nature of gender roles within the household.
