Imagine you’re a Singapore man. After two years of National Service, your female peers are two years ahead. You enter school: There are special bursaries and scholarships for women. You start working: There are women-only job fairs and networking clubs, and murmurs that companies prioritise diversity quotas over skill.
You start your own business: There are SME programmes only for women entrepreneurs. You see existing laws: Women are exempt from judicial caning.
With the #MeToo movement empowering women to speak up, you see high profile examples such as a doctor falsely accused of molestation – with exoneration in court only years later.
These examples, especially the positive discrimination policies favouring women, occur in competitive environments like school or work, where you’re fighting over a limited number of scholarships or job placements.
Falling into a zero-sum mindset, where benefitting women becomes conflated with harming men, becomes an easy crutch for some men
