Inequality needs to be understood as a shared, uneasy experience, even if different groups use different strategies to deal with it, argues TEO YOU YENN (Nanyang Technological University).

If we pay attention to inequality’s presence in people’s lives in an expansive way, what could we learn? More generally, what would we pay attention to in our scholarship?

Scholars today are, of course, already paying sustained attention to inequality. As a result, we know to think about inequality as the unequal distribution of income and wealth both between and within countries. We are conscious of how people have uneven access to things they need to live flourishing lives — clean water, good nutrition, adequate housing, health services, transportation networks, public spaces, et cetera. We know income and wealth often transform into cultural capital, assets that reproduce as well as entrench both privilege and marginality across generations in subtle and complex ways. We understand there are various dimensions along which people are rendered unequal — class, race, gender, sexual orientation. And increasingly we know that inequality in societies provide rich soil for the growth of social divisions and political polarization.

Even with this vast scholarship and collective wisdom, inequality remains challenging to capture through research. Analytically, inequality is more easily captured in the form of outcomes than as cause. That is, it is more straightforward to detect, track, and record how people of different ethnic, gender, and/or socioeconomic backgrounds fare in terms of their health and illness, educational attainment, or family formation prospects, than it is to show specifically how racialization, or the articulation of gender, or the doing of class lead to uneven and unequal lives.

And while there is growing consensus among scholars that inequality is harmful to societies in a range of ways and not just for marginalized groups, this larger, more generalized form of harm remains a difficult thing to conceptualize, demonstrate, and convey.

In short, it is easier to show the effects of inequality than it is to show the mechanisms through which it works. An analogy: it’s easier to say “this is a car and this is the speed it’s traveling at” than to explain the intricate interactions between car, road, atmosphere that contribute to its speed. But both are important: to tackle inequality fully — with an eye toward understanding and mitigating its harmful effects on society — we have to know the speed of the car but also the underlying mechanics and conditions of its movement.  

Let me give an example from my research on parenting to show what it means to take an expansive view of the presence of inequality in people’s lives and explore the mechanisms and workings of inequality.

An empirical example

Between 2018 and 2020, I conducted in-depth interviews with working parents, with the aim of understanding how people in Singapore manage their dual responsibilities of wage work and care for children. I wanted to know: how do Singaporeans with different access to resources and assets enact family life similarly and differently? What can we learn about the workings of inequality by paying attention to these similarities and differences?

Unsurprisingly, social class shapes how people manage work and care responsibilities. I spoke with respondents whom I characterized as working class, middle-class, and upper-middle class. People in the three groups have different levels of income and wealth; they live in different types of housing; have different levels of education; have jobs where they have different levels of prestige, flexibility, and control over time.

Their work-life reconciliation looks quite different. Class background affects parental strategies around children’s education. Working class parents make do with limited resources; they accept, often preemptively, that their children are not academically inclined. Upper-middle class parents use their ample resources to either prop children up or push them to excel. Middle class parents are endemically anxious about their children falling below average, and often strategize to maximize bang for their buck.

These variant parental resources and strategies certainly lead to different outcomes for children in terms of their academic successes and failures. A child who, left to their own devices, cannot finish homework or pass tests is more likely to nevertheless stay in ‘mainstream’ academic tracks if they are born to a upper-middle class family.

Yet, across class lines, parents in Singapore today share very similar views about what good parents should do and the centrality of education as parental duty. Regardless of class, the parents I spoke with could not stop mentioning children’s education. They used different strategies not because they have very different views about education’s importance but because money is so central to the choice of strategies.

In other words, there are strong shared realities of parenting in Singapore today. All parents are attentive to how much measurement, comparison, and competition there is. They are also hyper-aware of their positions in the social hierarchy.

Parents are constantly drawn into these dynamics and therefore deeply sensitive to what other parents and children are doing. They are profoundly conscious that what they do shapes outcomes for their kids not only in absolute terms but in comparative terms, relative to their peers.

Although Singapore seems a great place to raise a family, parents tend to feel unable to do well at work and at home. [Photo: Choo Yut Shing]

Inequality as context

What does this mean about how we should think about inequality?

Obviously, different class positions lead to different outcomes. But taking a more expansive view of inequality’s presence in people’s lives, I saw that inequality — the material reality that people in society are in unequal positions — infects and then pervades the worldviews of parents. It shapes how they see themselves as parents and how they behave toward their children.  

My findings reveal the salience of social hierarchies, competition, differential worth, and the individualization of responsibility. These realities, rooted in concrete, material experiences, create certain cultures — values, habits, norms, practices, social scripts, symbolic meanings — that encase parents’ and families’ lives.

Inequality is therefore not straightforwardly just cause or just outcome. It is better described as context. By context, I do not mean background. Instead, I mean something present and prevalent, not mere backdrop — like the air in a room, not its wallpaper.

Inequality makes its presence felt in persistent, complex, and messy ways. It is felt in material realities that we can quite easily see and identify — real money or its absence to pay for this or that. But it is also embedded in more subtle encounters and relationships — with teachers and schools, in the past and present; with relatives and co-workers and acquaintances, online and in-person. In various sites of life — workplaces, social gatherings, interactions with institutions — parents learn over and over again that life in Singapore is competitive, that ranking and hierarchies structure society, and that the game of life is one in which every family must fend for themselves.

People know this before they are parents, but the experience of parenting escalates and intensifies their learning of this lesson, makes especially salient how harsh the game is.

When we conceptualize inequality primarily as outcomes, we are looking, usually, for differences between groups or categories of persons.

But when we’re attentive to inequality as context, we have to ask instead: if this is the social world in which everyone is living, what might be common in their responses to it?

Uneasy. This is the title of a book I’m writing.

I spent hundreds of hours talking to mothers and fathers. People in jobs that pay very little and people in jobs that pay a lot. People who do not own their homes; people who own HDB flats; and people who live in houses with private swimming pools. I met parents who keep a close eye on money flows and sacrifice their own needs for their kids as well as parents who spend more than $10,000 per month on tuition and enrichment classes. One of the most interesting things I heard and saw, which I did not fully anticipate, is this commonality: uneasy lives.

What do I mean by unease?

Part of it is about the hectic rhythms of daily lives. People are always rushing, pressed for time. Parents feel they are unable to do well at work and at home.

The unease is also about their sense of the future. They worry about money and security, for themselves, their children, their ageing parents.

Although I started my project looking at work-life reconciliation, I ended up hearing particularly deep angst around children’s education. This is where unease is most obvious. Children are thought of and talked about as problems. It is not that children are not loved and cherished or that family life is devoid of joy. But education casts a giant shadow over the potential pleasures of parent-child relationships.

I use the word uneasy because people talked about the things they are doing as parents with a sense that it is not quite right—that childhood should not be so hard and learning should not be so painful, that parenting should not be such a chore, that a sense of balance should not be so elusive. Yet, people spoke as if they had no choice—that they may believe one thing but have to do another.

The contrast to unease is not just ease, it is agency. That is what seems most lacking—a sense that one can make choices, exercise agency, to parent or work or ‘do family’ in ways they think are right or good.

Where does this unease come from? Why are people living such uneasy lives in what looks, on paper, like a fantastic place to have families and raise children?

Here is where inequality as context comes in. In my book, I detail and map out how, within different sites of life, people encounter the logic of ranking, hierarchy, and competition. To do this, I pay close attention to what working parents encounter in their lives as they navigate work and care responsibilities.

I talked to people about what work is like and social policies around parental leave; I paid attention to childcare centers and kindergartens and the organization of care in Singapore today; I learnt from parents about school enrolment and educational pathways, about parent-teacher interactions and school expectations; I listened for how people talk about tuition; and about their social networks made up of friends, family, co-workers, other parents; and I situated what they said in the public discourse and the media environment.

I try to show how people come to see and take for granted that there are criteria for deservedness and belonging in Singapore society, that people are not all or inherently worthy. And I look at how people’s experiences, in their own childhoods and now their children’s childhood, solidify the common sense that educational credentials are crucial in shaping where people end up in a social hierarchy, and that where one ends up in a hierarchy matters for their long-term wellbeing and security.

Competition and hierarchy are part of the shared experience of inequality. [Photo: TIB1218R]

Studying inequality as a feature of social life

Let me return to the question I began with: If we pay attention to inequality’s presence in people’s lives in an expansive way, what could we learn about the social world? And then more generally, what would we pay attention to in our scholarship—what we study, how we interpret data, how we present our work? 

We must of course continue to pay attention to how unequal income or wealth lead to uneven outcomes in wellbeing. But in addition, we should pay attention to inequality as a feature of social life.

Uneven material conditions are also accompanied by and in turn generate particular ideas, scripts, imaginations, logics, norms, values. These shape how people live and feel and see the world, and therefore how they act in it. How they act in it can reproduce some of those very inequalities.

In other words, the effect of inequality is not just different outcomes for different groups, but the production of broad societal norms, habits, values — cultures.

Uneasiness and low fertility

What I have found about the interior of family life—the struggles parents encounter and the ambivalence and unease they feel — are relevant for how we think about the phenomenon of low fertility.

There are two ways to think about this, one empirical and the other methodological.

The empirical point is this: the realities of family life, and the context of inequality in which family is embedded, have meant that children, childbearing, parenting are fraught decisions or activities.

Although Singapore appears to be a great place to raise kids — safe and predictable, good infrastructure, including for childcare and education — the inside of actual family lives is hectic, stressful, insecure, uneasy. Particularly when it comes to education, there is an experiential gap between the highly-ranked world-class education system and the hustle and dread parents and children confront in their everyday lives.

It is difficult to openly express regret for the children one already has, so I heard this rarely (though not never). But I frequently heard laments of struggle, sacrifice, opportunity costs, anxieties, and decisions not to have more children after experiencing the realities of parenthood. More generally, the culture that has been generated — the shared terms, meanings, expectations and worldviews about what family is — is an uneasy one.

There is a wide gap between idealized versions of family and ordinary people’s experiences and imaginations of family.

This empirical claim relates to a methodological point.

To understand why people are having fewer children despite seemingly favorable conditions and active social policy, we should pay deep and wide attention to the realities of family lives and the shared scripts of family among ordinary Singaporeans.

I did not ask people only about their childbearing aspirations, and my study is not focused narrowly on a single point in the life course where fertility decisions are most pertinent. Instead, it captures in broad and open-ended ways the messiness of human life. When we as scholars try to capture and make sense of how people think, feel, behave, we must be attentive to the wide range of experiences and social forces that matter for constituting shared or common behaviors.

People’s worldviews about childbearing, parenthood, childhood are formed through a confluence of socially embedded experiences. Their practices emerge from negotiations of structural and cultural realities. We cannot always reduce these complex worldviews and practices to a ranking of static factors, nor draw conclusions only from individual opinions about individual priorities. We must be especially attentive to shared experiences and social norms.

Precisely because we already have so much scholarship in the world that alerts us to the centrality of inequality in contemporary life, this approach must be especially conscious of how inequality manifests — in interactions and relationships, in discourses and collective meaning systems, in shared habits and practices.

In my empirical study, my focus was on how the context of inequality affects working parents as they negotiate work and caregiving in their everyday lives. But one can imagine that scholars can capture how inequality manifests in other empirical sites or modes, such as through the uneven structures of labor markets or the uneven distribution of political and economic power in a society.

When we pay attention to inequality broadly, recognizing that it can shape human practices and perceptions in a wide range of ways, figuring out the mechanisms through which it perpetuates, we can also better understand fertility trends, ageing, care, and migration patterns.  

What is the purpose of scholarship?

I have made the claim that thinking of inequality as context means we would pay closer attention to mechanisms, sometimes unanticipated, and not just to outcomes, narrowly defined.

But I have not really said why all this matters. In my view, scholarly work ought to speak to and attempt to be a part of broader public debates. In my own work, I have to keep asking: what is the state of public debate on inequality in Singapore as well as globally? What are issues that often surface? What are issues that are regularly overlooked? Where does my work and the work of other scholars place, and how can we be helpful?

From doing this for some years now, I have seen that it is more difficult to convey and convince people of the harmful effects of inequality on society as a whole, than it is to show that inequality has harmful effects on specific groups.

Both are important of course. But precisely because it is difficult to show that inequality is problematic for society, it is hard to elevate and escalate public discussions of inequality to the level of urgency I believe it needs.

How we tell stories about the world can either reify or disrupt common sense. When inequality is handled primarily as difference between groups rather than as having profound consequences on us all, we have a harder time getting everyone to pay attention. When it is treated as mere phenomenon, not as problem created and reproduced by human actions, inequality is also naturalized and we’re left with few leavers to call for accountability.

In other words, I think we should study inequality as context because there is much work for scholars to do to help people see that inequality is a major problem for society as a whole, not just for marginalized groups. I hope that the more people see what is at stake, and the deep and wide harms in unequal societies, the more they will in turn partake in thinking and acting on the problem.

This also requires us to think of scholarship not just as individual projects but as collective knowledge production. As individual scholars we cannot each do all the things scholarship can do, but collectively we should try our best to cover our bases.

This demands creative thinking, maybe some rule breaking, and most importantly collaborations and learning across disciplines and methodologies. The way academia is structured today makes it difficult to do these things. It is especially difficult to think less in terms of how to advance one’s own individual career and more in terms of how to contribute to knowledge production. I hope, knowing these difficulties, enough scholars will prioritize this anyway.

This is an edited version of a keynote speech delivered on May 15 at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Population Association of Singapore, co-hosted by NTU’s Master of Science in Gerontology, and the Centre for the Study of Social Inequality.

— Teo You Yenn is Associate Professor and Provost’s Chair in Sociology, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Inequality (CSSI), at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is a co-editor of AcademiaSG.