PETALING JAYA: Women returning to the workforce often face low pay and mere entry-level positions, despite possessing prior work experience and higher educational qualifications, says the All Women’s Action Society (Awam).
Its assistant advocacy officer Alyssa Pong Le Ann said it is a clear reflection of how women and their unique skills and experiences are often devalued, overlooked, and seen as disposable.
She said that re-employment rates for women in their late 30s to 50s also remain alarmingly low, indicating a broader societal bias against women who have taken career breaks.
“A study by Robert Walters points to this, finding that almost half of hiring managers in Asia have not employed any returning women, with Malaysia being the highest at 52% of hiring managers not employing returning women.
“In 2022, an estimated two million women in Malaysia left the workforce, primarily due to caregiving and family responsibilities.”
Robert Walters is an international head-hunting and recruitment agency.
Pong said for those seeking to return to the workplace, the challenges extend beyond low wages.
She said issues such as inadequate job quality, lack of workplace security and benefits, unsafe working conditions, and limited promotion opportunities further hinder their reintegration.
“Unfair wages and limited promotion opportunities lead to a lack of women being represented across all levels in the workplace,” she said.
She added that gender biases at the leadership level often influence organisational practices, leading to further discrimination against women.
Pong said the tangible process to help women return to the workforce has been slow, despite the need for flexibility in the workplace being recognised in Budget 2025.
“The women’s labour force participation rate has largely hovered around the 55% to 56% mark for the past few years (according to the Statistics Department).
“Of those 55% to 56% of women in the workforce, a large majority (77.5%) are women between the ages of 25 and 29 years old,” she added.
Pong said Awam suggests employers view returning women as valuable contributors to the economy, not just as beneficiaries of tax breaks.
She said common misconceptions, such as the belief that returning mothers are less skilled or productive, exacerbate the “motherhood penalty”.
“However, studies have found that hiring returning women (mothers in particular) can lead to a more productive, representative, and inclusive workforce,” she added.
She urged the government to implement anti-discrimination legislation and fair pay, while private sector companies can also adopt pay transparency and gender-disaggregated pay gap reporting practices.
“Denmark requires companies to report employee pay levels broken down by gender for various job categories.
“Research found that wage transparency has led to the narrowing of the gender pay gap and would more likely lead to the employment and promotion of women workers,” she said, adding that employees also need to be equipped with negotiation skills and empowered to take collective action through union participation.
Dr Sharon A. Bong, Professor of Gender Studies at the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia, said women take breaks in employment often due to caregiving and health-related or personal reasons such as burnout.
“Their skills gap is exacerbated by the rapid developments in knowledge-based and skills-based industries that are further impacted by artificial intelligence (AI).
“The sense of being out of touch with the demands of the workforce and workplace is real and the onus to accelerate one’s reentry is often borne by the individual alone,” she said.
Bong said difficulty in finding work-life balance increases as the workplace can be an unforgiving place unless there is employee access to flexible hours, work from home arrangements and structured returnship programmes, and a general workplace culture that values equity, diversity and inclusion.
She said women are often faced with the institutional challenges in which the burden of caring for families are often the female’s responsibility.
“Institutional gender bias may well discriminate against women at the point of the job interview, such as to what extent are women employees considered a liability in anticipation that they would be taking work breaks, particularly for caregiving reasons.
“Societal and familial expectations are that it is often the women who would need to take the routine career breaks for caregiving reasons caring for their offspring and elderly, but such feminised caregiving is often devalued and not considered ‘work’ that matters,” she added.
