Picture a working parent mid-shift when the school calls — a fever, a meltdown, a scraped knee that needs stitches. On paper, they have the leave for exactly this situation.
But what actually runs through their head is: “Will my boss be annoyed? What if this costs me the next promotion?”
That fear has nothing to do with policy because flexibility within teams is entirely dependent on whoever they report to.
Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s promise to working parents is that parenthood should never become a career penalty.
If a manager does not care, however, none of that changes. The new leave just sits unused while a parent grits their teeth and stays at their desk.
This is a shift many parents have waited years for and is truly beneficial. However, it will live or die on a workplace’s culture.
Even if Singapore had pushed a mandate, it could force employers to comply but not sincerely. Employees can tell when flexibility is given reluctantly.
Source: Maria Nakamura
In many Singaporean households, the caregiving default hasn’t moved nearly as fast as the workplace conversation around it.
When a child is sick, school gets dismissed early, or when a parent needs to attend a parent-teacher meeting, it is still overwhelmingly the mother who is expected to drop everything.
That expectation can’t ever be written into any company policy. It comes from home, and that responsibility stays with a mother in the office every morning.
While the policy itself is gender-neutral on paper, family dynamics can’t be generalised, and the nation’s additional leave days may not be used evenly as a result.
Women remain far more likely than men to request flexible hours or take childcare leave, and they pay for it in the form of judgement simply for asking.
Once someone becomes the colleague who leaves early or works from home more often, peers and managers have a habit of reading that as reduced commitment, whether or not their actual output has changed.
Source: Maria Nakamura
This bias is not exclusive to women but is about being the one who visibly steps back from the desk to care for someone else.
Fathers are also in the same system, only from another side. They are twice as likely as mothers to get a cold response from a supervisor for taking leave to care for a child.
People generally calibrate risk off what they can actually observe.
In a workplace where nobody has reliable information about how a decision will be read, precedent provides the safest signal.
If no senior colleague has taken the leave, there’s no visible evidence it’s safe to be the first, and the hesitation is about career risk.
The extra load then resettles onto one parent. Multiply that across enough years and enough teams, and it becomes a real reason behind the gap in female leadership.
This is not something that is verbalised out loud.
But it shows up in who gets pulled into the next high-stakes project, who gets the benefit of the doubt when a deadline slips, and whose name doesn’t come up when a promotion is on the table.
Left unchecked by companies, these unspoken rules will continue slowing down exactly the parents this new policy was designed to support; much like the unchecked culture that let bullying and toxic workplace practices persist for decades across the legal industry.
Singapore has deployed funding, but whether parents can truly benefit from the new policy sits entirely with the nation’s corporate culture.
Source: Maria Nakamura
Most leaders will tell you their culture is fine, and they’ll believe it because the evidence in front of them is rigged in their favour.
If someone leaves, the story is, “she wasn’t cut out for it”, “he wanted an easier pace”, “they were never that committed to begin with”.
The more a leader built the place themselves, the harder this is to see, because any suggestion that the culture is the problem lands as a personal insult before it lands as information.
The legal profession found that out the hard way, surfacing years of complaints nobody tracked, until a government review forced everyone to actually look.
Childcare leave is walking into the same blind spot because no one will check whether a company is culturally sound for a parent.
By the time that pattern is visible enough to make headlines, years of people have already stepped back or left, and it’s too late to call it anything but a culture that got caught.
What protects a parent’s career is not their ‘permission to take leave’, but whether they’re backed and sponsored by people in power.
Leaders need to think past the next quarter, and not just whoever’s been the most visible this week.
That kind of short-sighted read won’t protect careers, and Singapore needs leaders with a longer view. One that rewards what someone delivered over months, not how many of those months they spent at their desk.
None of this is goodwill, and it doesn’t need to be.
Every employer who treats this as a culture problem they can’t afford to fix in this economy has the argument backwards.
Losing someone costs more than keeping them, once you count what it actually takes to replace their experience, relationships, everything a new hire spends a year rebuilding from zero.
Singapore has done its part and what companies do with that is now a straightforward question of who they choose to keep.
Maria Nakamura is the Head of Business & Hospitality at Arcc Spaces.
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Featured image adapted from Maria Nakamura.