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Hong Kong ‘should learn from Singapore’ on childcare, minister says

Law Chi-kwong pledges action to help mothers get back to work after childbirth, calling it a matter of gender equality

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Law Chi-kwong said making childcare more accessible was a matter of gender equality. Photo: Winson Wong
Tony Cheung

Hong Kong must improve public childcare service so more mothers can go to work and help ease the city’s impending manpower shortage, the labour minister said on Sunday.

Secretary for Labour and Welfare Dr Law Chi-kwong said making the services more accessible was a matter of gender equality, and an area in which Hong Kong could learn from Singapore.

Law said getting more people into work would ease the effects of a workforce shrinkage which is expected to kick in in the next few years.

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The government estimated that the size of the labour force would peak at 3.68 million in 2021, and start to decrease in 2022 as the population ages. The comparable figure for 2017 was 3.64 million. Neither figure takes into account the city’s hundreds of thousands of foreign domestic helpers.

Writing his weekly blog on Sunday, Law said that over the past two decades women in Hong Kong had become better educated and taken up more managerial positions, as their share of the labour force grew.

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“In 2016, 33 per cent of management jobs in Hong Kong were held by women, much higher than the 13 per cent in 1996 ... We also have a female chief executive in Hong Kong,” he wrote, in a reference to his boss, the city’s leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor.
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