THERE is a term economists use to describe what happens to many women after they become mothers: the motherhood penalty. It appears in lower earnings, interrupted careers, slower promotions and, eventually, smaller retirement savings.
But perhaps one of its most consequential effects is also one of the hardest to quantify: the narrowing of choice.
The choice to accept an assignment away from home. To stay after work for a course or meeting. To build a business. To step into leadership. Or, sometimes, even the choice of whether a family feels it has enough time, security and support to welcome another child.
These choices may appear deeply personal. But when the same constraints are experienced by millions of families, they become a question of public policy. In 2025, Malaysian women spent an average of 6 hours and 7 minutes every day on unpaid domestic and care work, compared with around 4 hours and 20 minutes for men.
A difference of 1 hour and 47 minutes may not sound extraordinary on any given day. Across a year, however, it amounts to approximately 651 hours - or more than 81 eight-hour working days.
This is not to suggest that caring for a child, preparing a meal or looking after a home is somehow “lost”. Care is indispensable. Its value to a family cannot, and should not, be measured by wages alone.
The question is not whether care matters. The question is who has the time to carry it.
Because when an imbalance of time accumulates day after day and year after year, it eventually becomes an imbalance of opportunity. It shapes who has the flexibility to take on new responsibilities, build experience, take risks, pursue further training or remain on a career trajectory long enough to reach leadership.
What begins as an unequal distribution of time at home eventually influences how much room each person has to grow beyond it.
Our National Women’s Survey 2025/2026 at Suluh Centre points to the same reality. Among respondents, 45.8% identified the double burden of family care as the biggest barrier to women’s participation in leadership. Although the question was about leadership, the answer speaks to something larger.
Talent alone does not guarantee participation when the conditions required to participate are unequal. And this should matter not only to those concerned about women’s advancement. It should matter to anyone concerned about Malaysia’s economic future.
The OECD estimates that greater female participation in employment could increase Malaysia’s GDP per capita by around 1.6% within five years, 3.2% over a decade and as much as 6.8% over the longer term.
When women have greater room to remain in employment, develop their skills and progress in their careers, the benefit does not stop with an individual woman or her household.
The country gains too.
The missing years between birth and independence
Malaysia has already recognised that the arrival of a child changes the lives of working parents. We provide maternity leave. We have introduced seven days of paternity leave. Employees may request flexible working arrangements.
These are important steps. But parenthood does not end when maternity or paternity leave does.
A child wakes up sick on a weekday morning. A childcare centre closes unexpectedly. There is a medical appointment, a school matter or an urgent family need that cannot simply be rescheduled outside working hours. For many families, these moments are managed quietly and privately.
Annual leave is used up. Unpaid leave is taken. Grandparents are called. Schedules are rearranged. A sympathetic supervisor is approached. And when these options run out, it is still too often the mother who steps back.
This is the gap that paid childcare leave can begin to address.
Malaysia should consider introducing six days of paid childcare leave each year for every mother and father with young children. This would recognise something relatively simple: that occasional caregiving emergencies are not exceptional events in the life of a working parent. They are part of raising a family.
Workers should not always have to pay for them through lost income, depleted annual leave or dependence on the discretion of individual employers.
Importantly, this should be a right available to both mothers and fathers.
If childcare leave is designed primarily as a benefit for women, we risk reinforcing the very assumption we should be trying to change - that care is fundamentally a mother’s responsibility.
Care policy must also be fatherhood policy. If we want men to participate more meaningfully at home, our institutions must give them the space to do so.
Learning from our neighbours, not copying them
There is no single foreign model that Malaysia can simply import. Every country has its own labour market, fiscal capacity, wage structure and social arrangements. But comparative experience can still help us ask better questions.
Singapore, for example, has continued to expand support for working parents. In August 2026, its government announced that childcare leave would increase to between eight and twelve days annually for each working parent, depending on the number of children aged 12 and below, alongside greater government funding for child-related leave.
The lesson is not that Malaysia must reproduce Singapore’s system in its entirety. It is the principle underneath it.
Support for families should not stop at childbirth.
A meaningful care architecture should follow the life of a family: protecting mothers through pregnancy and childbirth, enabling fathers to participate from the beginning, and recognising that care continues long after both parents have returned to work.
The costs we do not count
Malaysia already has a foundation to build on. Budget 2025 introduced tax incentives for employers that provide paid leave to workers with caregiving responsibilities. That is a useful beginning. But voluntary incentives are not the same as a minimum entitlement.
A possible next step would be a shared model: a statutory minimum for workers, with costs distributed between employers and government.
Take, for illustration, a woman earning around the formal-sector median wage of RM3,000 a month. Six days of paid childcare leave would amount to approximately RM692 a year. If employers funded three days and the government funded another three, the cost would be about RM346 per worker for each side.
At the theoretical extreme, if all of Malaysia’s nearly 17 million workers qualified and used all three government-funded days, the cost would amount to roughly RM5.82 billion annually - about 1.7% of the RM343.1 billion in Federal Government revenue projected for 2026.
In reality, expenditure would be considerably lower. Eligibility would apply only to parents of young children, and not every eligible parent would use the full entitlement each year. This is not a fiscal projection. It is simply a reminder that when discussing social policy, we should consider not only the visible costs of action but also the less visible costs of inaction.
Malaysia is already paying for inadequate care support. We pay when experienced employees leave the workforce and when women reduce their hours or turn down promotions. Businesses pay when they lose talent and have to recruit and retrain workers. Families pay through lost income and exhausted leave. And individuals pay through opportunities quietly surrendered over many years.
These costs rarely appear together on a government balance sheet. That does not mean they do not exist.
The demographic question
There is another reason this conversation matters.
Malaysia’s total fertility rate is now around 1.6 children per woman, considerably below the replacement level of 2.1. At the same time, our population is ageing. In the decades ahead, Malaysia will have proportionately fewer workers supporting a society with increasingly significant care needs.
And here lies a contradiction we should confront. We want more women to participate in the labour force. We also worry that Malaysians are having fewer children. Yet between those two ambitions, we have not fully built a working environment that makes it easier for people to do both.
Lower fertility does not necessarily mean Malaysians have stopped wanting families.
LPPKN research suggests that a large majority still aspire to have children, while some are unable to reach their desired family size because of pressures including income, the cost of living and demanding work schedules.
Perhaps, then, the debate on fertility should not begin by asking people why they are not having more children. Perhaps we should first ask whether we have made it sufficiently possible for them to raise the children they already hope to have.
That requires more than one policy.
Affordable childcare matters. Flexible work matters. Parental leave matters. Wages matter. Housing matters. And paid childcare leave should be part of that wider architecture of care.
We often say that it takes a village to raise a child.
For much of history, that village was understood to mean extended family and community. But in a modern economy, the village must be wider. It includes employers willing to recognise that workers are also caregivers. It includes communities that make raising children less isolating. And it includes a government prepared to recognise that care is not merely a private burden carried behind the doors of individual households.
It is part of our social and economic infrastructure. Because the children being cared for today will become the workers, taxpayers, neighbours and leaders of tomorrow. And the parents caring for them should not have to choose, repeatedly and unnecessarily, between being present for their families and participating fully in the life of the nation.
A country that says families matter must eventually build institutions that make family life possible.
Paid childcare leave would not solve every challenge facing working parents. But it would be one meaningful step towards a Malaysia where care is shared more fairly, where parenthood does not unnecessarily narrow a person’s possibilities, and where raising the next generation is understood for what it truly is: a responsibility carried by families, but an investment shared by us all. - October 1, 2026
Nadia Nazri
Executive Director, Suluh Centre
Suluh Centre is an independent think tank and advocacy organisation that brings together evidence-based research, policy advocacy and community empowerment to expand knowledge, build capacity and strengthen people’s ability to shape the decisions that affect their lives.
