This Mother’s Day, Let’s Talk About Mothers Left Behind

Prepared by Nur Sakinah Alzian

11 May 2025

Every Mother’s Day, we celebrate the strength and resilience of mothers. We praise mothers who wake up before dawn to get their children ready for school, rush to drop them off, brave traffic to get to work, leave early to pick them up, and still manage to prepare dinner at home. These women are often held up as heroes, and rightfully so, because becoming a mother still comes at a cost. 

However, when working women enter motherhood, they pay the motherhood penalty The motherhood penalty refers to the economic disadvantages that working mothers face in the workplace. The penalty can look like lower pay, reduced promotions, or limited hiring opportunities. In Malaysia, this often leads to a single-peak career progression. Their career growth stagnates as they shift more of their time and energy toward caregiving duties. Many never return once they leave the workforce as they have to care for their children. 

Various policies and programs have been introduced, such as career comeback initiatives, tax incentives for businesses that hire mothers, and flexible work arrangements to help women balance work and caregiving. However, such policies and programs are often built on the narrow assumption that all women work in formal, full-time jobs. This leaves mothers in informal, part-time or precarious work (who are just as deserving of support) to remain largely sidelined in policy design.

Why What Counts as Work Matters in Policy Design

Malaysia’s female labour force participation rate in 2024 stood at 56.2%. By this measure, this means that half of the nation’s female population are not working. However, does this figure truly capture the full range of work that women do? While the data includes self-employed or freelance workers, it overlooks informal and unpaid labour, such as running a small home-based business, selling baked goods, or managing an online store. These forms of income-generating activity don’t fit the narrow, formal definitions used in official statistics. As a result, they are rendered invisible in policy priorities and do not enjoy employment benefits and social security that full-time employment provides. 

Even women in formal but contract-based work arrangements are often excluded from basic employment benefits. Take Fatin*, a religious education teacher in Kelantan, interviewed by SERI. While her contract requires her to teach three half-days each week, the scope of her responsibilities amounts to full-time employment. Despite her consistent workload, she reports that she and her female colleagues aren’t entitiled to paid maternity leave. 

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Besides calling for more inclusive employment benefits, policy design must also recognise a crucial truth: care work is work. For many women, it is a full-time, unpaid job that supports the entire economy.This is where the conversation must expand from supporting mothers in the workforce to valuing the care work that makes other work possible.

The Care Economy For Who?

This reality demands we reassess whom we are building the care economy for. The national discourse around the care economy and childcare tends to focus on market-driven solutions. Chief among them is expanding the private sector’s role in care provision. While these efforts may increase choices for middle- and upper-income families, they leave low-income women behind.

Childcare, whether formal or informal, is expensive for low-income mothers. The burden of childcare disproportionately falls heavily on mothers, and the high cost of care consumes a substantial portion of their household income. The math does not add up for a mother earning minimum wage or working informally. This financial strain forces them to exit formal employment or avoid it altogether, as the cost of paid childcare may outweigh potential earnings. 

When private care is unaffordable, and participation in the workforce remains out of reach, the cycle of economic exclusion persists. 

A Final Reflection

Finally, a mother of four in Selangor, shared in an interview with SERI how she juggles caring for her children, a sick husband, and an ailing mother with dementia, while trying to make ends meet through sporadic gig work. With limited education and income, she struggles to find stable employment and remains trapped in a cycle of economic vulnerability. Her story is not unique. It is the lived reality for many women across Malaysia. 

Calling them heroes is not enough. Without recognition, protection, and investment in their realities, our praise rings hollow. This is not just a problem of affordability. It is a problem of priority. This Mother’s Day, we must go beyond empty praise and confront the policies that continue to leave a huge segment of mothers behind. 

The interviews referenced in this article are part of a larger study by SERI on gender discrimination in the workplace. 

*Names mentioned in this article have been changed to maintain the interviewees’ privacy.

References :

1. Baum, C. L. “A Dynamic Analysis of the Effect of Child Care Costs on the Work Decisions of Low-Income Mothers with Infants.” Demography 39, no. 1 (February 2002). https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.2002.0002.

2. Correll, Shelley J., Stephen Benard, and In Paik. “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?1.” American Journal of Sociology, March 2007. https://doi.org/10.1086/511799.

3. Department of Statistics Malaysia. “Statistics on Women Empowerment in Selected Domains,” 2024. https://www.dosm.gov.my/portal-main/release-content/statistics-on-women-empowerment-in-selected-domains-malaysia-2024.

4. Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development, and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Project. “Study to Support The Development of National Policies and Programmes to Increase and Retain the Participation of Women in The Malaysian Labour Force: Key Findings and Recommendations.” Accessed May 2, 2025. https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/migration/my/Women-In-Malaysian-Labour-Force-Study-with-UNDP-2013.pdf.

5. Nor, Zarina Md. “Precarious Employment amongst Low Income Single Mothers in Malaysia: The Implications on Family Wellbeing.” E3S Web of Conferences 339 (2022): 06009.

6. World Bank. “Malaysia Country Gender Notes 2021,” 2021. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/933b3292-780e-5822-91b2-8e324b2baf33/content.