Authors: Patrick Daly, Caroline Brassard, Jamie McCaughey Reuben Ng, Laavanya Kathiravelu, and Benjamin Horton
In April 2020, the Singapore government instituted a set of "Circuit Breaker" (CB) measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. These included restricting international travel, closing non-essential businesses, telecommuting, implementing home-based-learning for schools, wearing faces masks in public spaces, temperature screening, rigorous contract tracing, and isolating infected and exposed persons.
Researchers from the Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and ETH Zurich partnered with Yougov to conduct a representative survey of Singaporean citizens and permanent residents to gauge levels of agreement with the CB measures and weigh the perceived trade-offs between the actual disruptions of the CB period and the possible burdens of contracting Covid-19. We conducted bi-monthly survey waves between 7 May and 16 July 2020 on over a thousand Singaporean citizens and permanent residents. Overall, our data showed that people had high levels of agreement with most of the circuit breaker measures [vulnerable persons staying at home, telecommuting, social distancing, and wearing masks]. However, we found some significant differences between how women and men viewed the circuit breaker measures. In this piece, we will focus on how perspectives about the circuit breaker measures were gendered.
Agreement with the main Circuit Breaker Measures
At the beginning of the circuit breaker period, women were more likely than men to agree that non-essential workers and the elderly should stay at home, people should practice social distancing, and people should wear masks when in public (Table 1). During this same period, men were significantly more likely to agree that children should be in school and that circuit breaker measures should be lifted both regionally and across the entire country. By the end of our survey period, there were still significant differences in agreement between women and men for elderly staying at home, social distancing, and wearing masks. However, over the course of the circuit breaker period, the difference in agreement about working from home, students being in school, and that circuit breaker measures should be selectively lifted by area based upon infection levels disappeared. Interestingly, throughout the entire survey period, men were more likely than women to support mandatory Covid-19 testing.
We asked how willing people would be to continue some aspects of the circuit breaker in the feature as needed if the Covid-19 pandemic continued, or for other public health issues. We found surprisingly high levels of professed willingness to continue the main mitigation measures (Table 2). Interestingly, we found less of a difference between female and male respondents for future willingness than we did for agreement with actual measures during the Circuit Breaker period.
Table 1. Percentages of respondents whom agreed with respective mitigation measures, by gender (data limited to male and female categories).
Table 2. Percentages of respondents willing to continue circuit breaker mitigation measures in the future, by gender (data limited to male and female categories).
Table 3. Levels of agreement that the mitigation measures were worth having for personal and communal well-being, by gender (data limited to male and female categories).
While the circuit breaker measures enjoyed relatively high levels of support from most permanent residents and citizens in Singapore, especially at the on-set of the circuit breaker period, gender was the main demographic variable that showed different levels of agreement. Our survey suggests that women were more likely to consider the disruptions of the circuit breaker measures worth making, and also more likely to agree with measures needed to reduce Covid-19 transmission. This finding aligns with a growing body of data from around the world that shows the gendered nature of Covid-19 mitigation measures, and broader willingness of women to prioritise steps seen as necessary to protect personal and communal wellness.
This research is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore, and the Singapore Ministry of Education under the Research Centres of Excellence initiative. This work comprises Earth Observatory of Singapore contribution no. 383. This research is approved by the NTU IRB board, IRB-2020-05-013-01.
(Photo credit: Kingsley Yang)
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