Document Code: SG-H-THINK-14 Full Title: Teo You Yenn --- The Sociologist Who Made Singapore See Its Poor: The Complete Intellectual Profile of Singapore's Most Influential Voice on Inequality, Class, and the Structural Reproduction of Disadvantage Coverage Period: 2007--2026 Level Designation: Intellectual Profile Version Date: 2026-03-17

Biographical Foundation
Complete Bibliography
The Neoliberal Morality Thesis (2011)
"This Is What Inequality Looks Like" --- The Landmark Book (2018)
The Meritocracy Critique: How the System Legitimises Its Victors
The Dignity Deficit: Social Assistance and Human Worth
Housing, Rental Flats, and the Architecture of Stigma
Education, Class Barriers, and the Reproduction of Inequality
The Anti-Welfare Familialist State
Gender, Motherhood, and Pro-Natalist Contradictions
Workfare vs Social Protection
The Minimum Income Standards Project
Education as Care Labour
The Social Compact, Forward Singapore, and "Ordinary People Dream"
Academic Freedom, POFMA, and the Right to Speak
COVID-19 and Structural Inequality
Public Quotations: A Compendium
Impact and Reception of "This Is What Inequality Looks Like"
Debates and Positioning: Against the Establishment Narrative
Awards and Recognition
Assessment: The Teo You Yenn Contribution

1. Biographical Foundation

Education and Academic Career

Teo You Yenn (Chinese: Zhang Youyuan) received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, one of the world's leading sociology departments and a historic centre of critical social theory and public sociology. Her doctoral training at Berkeley --- with its traditions of ethnographic rigour, feminist sociology, and engagement with questions of power and inequality --- would profoundly shape her intellectual trajectory.

She joined Nanyang Technological University (NTU) upon her return to Singapore, where she rose through the academic ranks to become:

Associate Professor of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, NTU
Provost's Chair in Sociology --- an endowed position recognising distinction in research and teaching
Head, Department of Sociology (later Division of Sociology), School of Social Sciences, NTU

Her research programme encompasses poverty and inequality, governance and state-society dynamics, gender and class inequalities as generated by social policies, and care and welfare regimes. She maintains ongoing projects on minimum income standards and the structural conditions of disadvantage in Singapore.

Institutional and Public Roles

Beyond her NTU position, Teo serves on the Board of AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research), Singapore's leading feminist advocacy organisation. She is a co-founder of Academia.SG, a scholar-led initiative to promote Singapore studies and encourage critical debate about intellectual life in Singapore. She contributes regularly to public debate through public lectures, media commentaries in The Straits Times, TODAY, Channel NewsAsia (CNA), Lianhe Zaobao, New Naratif, and other platforms.

2. Complete Bibliography

Books

Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How Family Policies Make State and Society (London; New York: Routledge, 2011). Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series. Paperback edition 2014 (ISBN 978-0-415-74879-7).
This Is What Inequality Looks Like (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2018). ISBN 978-981-47-8087-6.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

"Inequality for the Greater Good: Gendered State Rule in Singapore." Critical Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2007): 423--445.
"Shaping the Singapore Family, Producing the State and Society." Economy and Society 39, no. 3 (2010): 337--359.
"Support for Deserving Families: Inventing the Anti-Welfare Familialist State in Singapore." Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 20, no. 3 (2013): 387--406.
"Differentiated Deservedness: Governance through Familialist Social Policies in Singapore." TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia 3, no. 1 (2015): 73--93.
"Interrogating the Limits of Welfare Reforms in Singapore." Development and Change 46, no. 1 (2015): 95--120.
"Not Everyone Has 'Maids': Class Differentials in the Elusive Quest for Work-Life Balance." Gender, Place & Culture 23, no. 8 (2016): 1164--1178.
"Education as Care Labor: Expanding Our Lens on the Work-Life Balance Problem." Current Sociology 71, no. 4 (2023): 626--643. First published online 2022.

Book Chapters and Contributions to Edited Volumes

"The Singaporean Welfare State System: With Special Reference to Public Housing and the Central Provident Fund." Pp. 383--397 in The Routledge International Handbook to Welfare State Systems, edited by Christian Aspalter. London; New York: Routledge, 2017. Updated second edition chapter published 2023.
"Falling Short: Class and the Performance of the Familial." Pp. 96--111 in Family and Population Change in Singapore: A Unique Case in the Global Family Changes, edited by Wei-Jun Jean Yeung and Shu Hu. London: Routledge, 2018.
"From Public Sociology to Collective Knowledge-Production." Pp. 54--65 in The Routledge International Handbook of Public Sociology, edited by L. Hossfeld, E. B. Kelly, and C. Hossfeld. London: Routledge, 2021.
"Ordinary People Dream." In Why Not? Thinking about Singapore's Tomorrow, edited by Kanwaljit Soin and Margaret Thomas. Singapore: World Scientific, 2024.

Research Reports (Minimum Income Standards Project)

Ng Kok Hoe, Teo You Yenn, et al. What Older People Need in Singapore: A Household Budgets Study. Singapore: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS, 2019.
Ng Kok Hoe, Teo You Yenn, Yu Wei Neo, Ad Maulod, Stephanie Chok, and Yee Lok Wong. What People Need in Singapore: A Household Budgets Study. 2021. Available at whatsenough.sg.
Ng Kok Hoe, Yee Lok Wong, Teo You Yenn, Yu Wei Neo, Ad Maulod, and Stephanie Chok. Minimum Income Standard 2023: Household Budgets in a Time of Rising Costs. 2023. SSRN Working Paper.

Selected Public Essays, Op-Eds, and Commentary

"Academic Freedom in Singapore and the 'Fake News' Law." New Naratif, 11 April 2019.
"Poor People Don't Like Oats Either." New Naratif, [2019].
"Crisis Is Exactly the Time to Make Structural Changes to Address Poverty and Inequality" (with Ng Kok Hoe). Academia.SG, 2020.
"Inequality and Social Good: A New Culture of Shared Wellbeing Requires Reforming a System That Promotes Individualism." Academia.SG, 2022. (Edited text of speech at Singapore Economic Policy Forum 2022.)
"Security and Independence Are Basic Needs." Academia.SG.
Op-eds on basic living standards and living wages in The Straits Times (co-authored with Ng Kok Hoe), various dates following MIS report launches.
"Speaking Out of Turn." Personal blog (teoyouyenn.sg), 8 October 2019.
"Later: An Unanticipated Year of Autoethnography." Ethos Books blog, [2020].

ISA Publications

"Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: Institutionalising the Logics of Neoliberalism." ISA eSymposium for Sociology, July 2012.

3. The Neoliberal Morality Thesis (2011)

The Core Argument

Teo's first monograph, Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How Family Policies Make State and Society (Routledge, 2011), established the theoretical foundation for all her subsequent work. The book's central concept --- "neoliberal morality" --- denotes a set of institutionalised relationships and ethical meanings that link citizens to each other and to the state, produced through the everyday operation of policy.

The argument proceeds as follows:

Step 1: Family policies as the entry point. Singapore's government has implemented extensive policies to encourage marriage and boost fertility rates --- the Baby Bonus, tax incentives, housing privileges for married couples, childcare subsidies, and more. These policies are conventionally understood either as failed attempts at social engineering (demographers note that fertility rates have continued to decline despite them) or as evidence of an exceptionally interventionist state. Teo argues that both interpretations, while partially correct, miss the most significant effects of these policies.

Step 2: The production of neoliberal subjects. Through policies that shape people's everyday rhythms and realities --- when they marry, how they structure households, how they allocate care responsibilities, what housing they can access --- neoliberal logic becomes institutionalised and naturalised. Citizens come to understand themselves primarily as individual economic actors responsible for their own welfare, even as the state claims its policies are communally oriented.

Step 3: The paradox of communitarian rhetoric and neoliberal practice. While the Singapore state claims its family policies are grounded in "Asian values" and communitarian ideals, the policies actually operate primarily between the state and individual family units, setting up conditions that are more neoliberal than communitarian. The rhetoric of community masks the reality of individualised responsibility.

Step 4: The disruption of the traditional family. Teo identifies a fundamental contradiction at the heart of state policy. The Singapore state's prioritisation of economic growth necessarily disrupts the traditional family it rhetorically champions. Through its promotion of women's workforce participation, high-rise apartment living, English-language dominance over other languages, and intense population control policies, the state has altered the structural conditions of family life. It then blames citizens --- especially women --- for the demographic consequences of these structural changes.

Step 5: Neoliberal morality as a shared reality with limits. This "neoliberal morality" articulates a vision of appropriate state roles and links Singaporeans together through shared realities. But the collectivity has important limits: Singaporeans have limited avenues for understanding fellow citizens' broader grievances and fewer opportunities to articulate collective grievances against the state. The morality produced is one of individualised striving, not collective solidarity.

Significance

The neoliberal morality thesis was foundational because it reframed the standard academic debate about Singapore's welfare regime. Rather than asking whether Singapore is a "developmental state" or a "productivist welfare regime" (the standard comparative politics categories), Teo asked how the state's policies produce particular kinds of moral subjects --- citizens who understand their obligations, aspirations, and failures in neoliberal terms, even when they live in a society that officially rejects "Western liberalism."

4. "This Is What Inequality Looks Like" --- The Landmark Book (2018)

Genesis and Methodology

This Is What Inequality Looks Like was published by Ethos Books, a Singapore literary press, in January 2018. The book is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over three years, during which Teo interviewed over 200 individuals from families living in low-income residential areas. She made approximately 90 visits to these families, each lasting around three hours. The research sites were primarily HDB rental flat estates --- the housing of last resort in Singapore's public housing system.

The book is structured as a collection of interconnected essays, arranged to be read individually but designed to build cumulatively. Each essay accomplishes two things: first, it introduces a key aspect of the experience of being low-income in contemporary Singapore; second, it illustrates how people's experiences are linked to structural conditions of inequality.

Structure and Content

The book contains twelve essays (though some sources report ten chapters) covering:

The experience of poverty in everyday life --- what it means to be poor in one of the world's wealthiest countries, where the dominant narrative insists that hard work leads to success
Housing --- the conditions, stigma, and regulations surrounding rental flats
Education --- how the education system sorts, selects, and hierarchises, reproducing class advantage under the guise of meritocracy
Work and wages --- the profound disparities within Singapore's labour market and the inadequacy of low wages
Family and care --- the impossibility of performing middle-class ideals of family when one lacks the resources to do so
Dignity and social assistance --- the indignities of navigating Singapore's "many helping hands" social assistance system
The structural production of inequality --- how institutions, policies, and narratives combine to reproduce disadvantage

The Central Thesis

The book's overarching argument is that inequality in Singapore is not an unfortunate byproduct of an otherwise well-functioning system, nor is it the result of individual failure. It is a structural outcome of the way Singapore's institutions --- housing, education, social assistance, employment --- are designed and operated. These institutions do not merely fail to address inequality; they actively reproduce it.

Teo insists on writing about inequality rather than merely poverty. As she explains in her essay "When Thinking Poverty, Also Think Inequality":

"The first few essays detail everyday experiences of people living with low income, situating their experiences in the larger context of a wealthy city compared to people with more money, because people do not live in isolated bubbles and our sense of wellbeing is embedded in our relationship to others in society."

She illustrates the relational nature of inequality with a personal example:

"When I go about my day with people addressing me as 'Prof Teo' and my respondent goes about her day cleaning toilets as people pass her by without seeing her, these are the concrete experiences that shape our sense of belonging and of who we are."

The Ethnographic Voice

What distinguished the book from academic treatises on inequality was its ethnographic intimacy. Teo does not present statistics and policy analyses (though these inform her work); she presents lives. The reader encounters actual people --- mothers struggling with childcare, workers earning poverty wages, tenants navigating the stigma of rental housing, families experiencing the daily humiliation of being deemed "undeserving" by the systems meant to help them.

The essays reveal conditions of "deprivation, insecurity, and undignified" living that the book insists "are the everyday realities of life in Singapore" --- realities that most Singaporeans, especially those in the comfortable middle and upper classes, never see and are structurally insulated from seeing.

5. The Meritocracy Critique: How the System Legitimises Its Victors

The Core Formulation

Teo's critique of meritocracy is among the most potent intellectual challenges to Singapore's governing ideology. She argues:

"Inequality, in fact, is a logical outcome of meritocracy. What the education system does when it selects, sorts, and hierarchizes, and when it gives its stamp of approval to those 'at the top,' is that it renders those who succeed through the system as legitimately deserving. Left implicit is that those at the bottom have failed to be deserving."

This formulation --- that meritocracy is not merely imperfect but structurally productive of inequality --- goes further than the conventional liberal critique (which holds that meritocracy would work if only starting positions were equalised). Teo argues that the system's function is not to identify talent impartially but to legitimate outcomes. Those who end up at the top are certified as deserving; those at the bottom are, by implication, certified as undeserving.

The Individualisation of Failure

A key element of the meritocracy critique is what Teo calls the individualisation of structural disadvantage:

"Meritocracy is a system that legitimizes those who end up as victors, casting them as individuals who have succeeded on their own hard work and intelligence rather than on any inherited unfair advantages. It is also a system that tells us a specific story about failures, casting those as individual lacks rather than systemic disadvantages, and works very well in convincing us that we all deserve to be exactly where we are."

The consequence is a society in which:

"Singaporeans live in a social and cultural milieu that encourages and compels an individualist mode of conceptualizing reality: individuals are unique, each person makes his or her own choices, chooses their own path, with the sentiment 'In the end, it's up to the individual.'"

Meritocracy as Ideology Rather Than Mechanism

Teo's intervention is to treat meritocracy not as a neutral mechanism that can be perfected through better calibration, but as an ideology --- a system of beliefs that serves particular interests by making the existing distribution of rewards appear natural and just. From a sociological perspective, "education systems embed within them many inequalities; so-called meritocracies have too often rationalized rather than alleviated inequalities that stem from class, ethnicity, and gender."

This framing directly challenges the PAP government's longstanding insistence that meritocracy is Singapore's foundational principle of social organisation. Where the government argues that meritocracy needs to be refined and broadened (as Education Minister Ong Ye Kung argued in Parliament in July 2018, calling for Singapore to "double down" on meritocracy by broadening its definition), Teo argues that the problem is not in the execution but in the concept itself --- at least insofar as meritocracy operates within a context of deeply unequal starting positions and then claims to have produced a fair outcome.

Conditional Respect

One of the book's most powerful themes is the argument that dignity in Singapore is conditional --- attached to economic productivity and wealth rather than to personhood:

"The respect I am accorded are conditional on my participation in society as an economically productive and relatively wealthy person. It has little to do with my inherent right to respect as a human being and member of this society."

This observation --- that respect is earned through market participation rather than granted as a right of citizenship --- is a direct critique of Singapore's productivist social compact, in which the state's legitimacy rests on delivering economic growth and citizens' standing depends on their contribution to that growth.

Dignity and Expiration Dates

Teo argues that genuine dignity should not be conditional on economic utility:

"In an ideal world, dignity doesn't have an expiration date attached to economic productivity. It affirms the worth of personhood. It feels different from what we have."

The Attack on Parental Identity

The dignity deficit is particularly acute in the realm of parenting. Low-income parents not only lack material resources; they face a systematic devaluation of their parenting practices and identities:

"To have one's parenting practices be unintelligible, unacknowledged, deemed less worthy, is a profound form of attack on the self, especially when being a parent is a central part of one's identity."

Low-income parents do not merely fail to provide the enrichment activities and tuition that middle-class parents provide; their ways of parenting --- shaped by the material constraints they face --- are rendered invisible or illegitimate by the dominant norms of "good parenting" that presuppose middle-class resources.

The Demand for Superhuman Performance

Perhaps the book's most widely quoted line captures the impossible standard imposed on the poor:

"No one should have to be super in order to be human."

This encapsulates Teo's argument that the social system demands extraordinary resilience, resourcefulness, and endurance from those with the fewest resources, while requiring nothing comparable from those with the most. The poor must be exceptional merely to survive; the affluent need only be ordinary to thrive.

Power and Choice

Teo draws an explicit connection between structural power and the perpetuation of inequality:

"We who have the power to make choices disproportionately shape outcomes and limit options for people who don't have the power to make choices. It follows that if we don't share the power to make choices, we will never see a change to those things we say are bad or unacceptable to our society."

And on the nature of institutional power:

"People sitting in positions of authority are powerful not because they feel empowered but because they have power. Their feelings of empowerment are an outcome of their actual ownership of power, not the cause."

7. Housing, Rental Flats, and the Architecture of Stigma

The Singapore Housing Paradox

Singapore's public housing programme --- in which approximately 80% of the population lives in HDB (Housing and Development Board) flats --- is routinely cited as one of the great achievements of post-independence governance. Home ownership rates exceeding 90% are presented as evidence of shared prosperity and social stability.

But Teo's ethnographic work reveals the dark underside of this narrative: the five to six percent of Singaporean households who rent rather than own their HDB flats. These rental tenants --- overwhelmingly low-income families, many of them Malay, many of them headed by single mothers, many of them elderly --- occupy one- and two-room flats that exist as an entirely separate tier within the public housing system.

Rental as Stigma

In a society where home ownership is the "default" mode, rental housing has become shorthand for poverty and failure. The government's extensive incentivisation of home ownership --- through CPF usage, grants, subsidies, and the entire architecture of asset-based welfare --- has had the effect of stigmatising those who cannot buy. Rental tenants are the visible remainder, the people who the meritocratic system has classified as having "failed."

Teo documents the physical conditions of rental housing: overcrowded units shared by strangers, units in poor repair, environments that lack the amenities and community infrastructure available in owner-occupied estates. But beyond the physical conditions, she documents the social and psychological toll --- the shame of living in a "rental block," the surveillance and conditionality imposed on rental tenants, the constant threat of lease non-renewal.

Housing Policy as Class Reproduction

Teo argues that Singapore's housing policies are "intrinsically linked to the broader social and economic stratifications in society." The system does not merely reflect existing inequalities; it produces and reproduces them. The asset appreciation that home-owning families enjoy over decades --- one of the primary vehicles for wealth accumulation in Singapore --- is entirely unavailable to rental tenants. Each generation of home owners passes on accumulated housing wealth to the next; each generation of renters starts again from nothing.

The precarity is compounded by the fact that eligibility for rental housing is means-tested (with income ceilings, currently set at S$1,500 per month), and allocation is competitive: only about one-third of applicants are allocated rental flats. The system creates a bottleneck at the very bottom of the housing ladder, ensuring that even the most basic form of shelter is scarce, conditional, and stigmatised.

The Right to Family and Housing

Teo extends the housing analysis to the question of family formation:

"Given the centrality of the family for well-being in this society, we should have the right not just to form families, but to give and receive care, and to build meaningful and dignified lives."

Because Singapore's housing system links housing access to marital and family status --- unmarried individuals under 35 cannot purchase HDB flats; single parents face significant restrictions; divorced persons may lose their housing --- Teo argues that housing policy functions as a tool of social engineering that disproportionately penalises those whose family structures do not conform to the state's preferred model.

8. Education, Class Barriers, and the Reproduction of Inequality

The Education Sorting Machine

Teo's analysis of education focuses not on curriculum or pedagogy but on the structural function of the education system as a mechanism of social sorting. The system "selects, sorts, and hierarchizes" students, ostensibly on the basis of academic ability but in practice on the basis of the resources --- financial, cultural, social --- that families can bring to bear.

In Singapore's intensely competitive education environment, parental investment in tuition, enrichment activities, and educational resources has become the decisive factor in academic outcomes. Teo's research demonstrates that this investment is massively differentiated by class: middle-class and affluent families spend thousands of dollars per month on tuition and enrichment; low-income families cannot. The education system then rewards the outcomes of this unequal investment as if they were the product of individual merit.

The Blindness of the System

In an interview with Mothership.SG in 2019, Teo elaborated on why Singaporeans fail to perceive education inequality:

The system conditions people to focus on their own lanes --- their own children's performance, their own families' strategies --- rather than seeing the broader pattern of advantage and disadvantage. The competitive structure of education produces an individualist orientation: each family is focused on optimising its own outcomes, and the systemic production of unequal starting positions becomes invisible.

"Not Everyone Has 'Maids'"

Teo's 2016 paper in Gender, Place & Culture --- "Not Everyone Has 'Maids': Class Differentials in the Elusive Quest for Work-Life Balance" --- provides the academic scaffolding for these observations. The paper demonstrates that work-life balance policies have dramatically different effects depending on class position. Working-class women work longer days, have less occupational flexibility, and have fewer financial resources to outsource domestic work. The ability of some families to employ domestic workers ("maids") has, paradoxically, lowered the social value and visibility of domestic labour, downplaying the emotional and physical efforts required of married women who cannot afford to outsource.

9. The Anti-Welfare Familialist State

The Three Pillars

Across multiple academic publications --- "Support for Deserving Families" (2013), "Differentiated Deservedness" (2015), "Interrogating the Limits of Welfare Reforms" (2015), and her Routledge handbook chapters --- Teo constructs a comprehensive analysis of Singapore's welfare regime. She describes what she calls the "anti-welfare familialist state," built on three pillars:

Self-reliance as the ultimate welfare. The state's foundational ideological commitment is that citizens should meet their needs through their own labour market participation and savings (primarily through the CPF). State assistance is positioned as a last resort, to be accessed only after all other avenues --- personal savings, family support, community aid --- have been exhausted.
Familial preconditions. Access to many forms of state support is conditional on particular family forms. Housing grants require marriage. Childcare subsidies are calibrated to family structure. The CPF system assumes lifelong employment and intact family units. The state extols a paradigm citizen as someone in a heterosexual relationship who forms a nuclear family. Those whose family arrangements deviate from this norm --- the unmarried, the divorced, single parents, non-heterosexual couples --- face systematic disadvantage.
Many Helping Hands. Rather than providing universal social protection directly, the state delegates significant welfare functions to voluntary welfare organisations (VWOs), community organisations, and religious bodies --- the "Many Helping Hands" approach. This diffuses responsibility, creates a patchwork of provision with gaps and overlaps, and embeds moral judgements about "deservingness" into the welfare delivery system.

Differentiated Deservedness

The concept of "differentiated deservedness" is Teo's most original contribution to welfare state theory. She argues that Singapore's social policies do not merely provide benefits; they actively construct categories of more and less deserving citizens. Specific "performances of the familial" --- getting married, having children within marriage, maintaining a heterosexual nuclear household --- are rewarded with state support. Those who fail to perform the familial in the approved manner are deemed less deserving.

This is not merely a matter of policy design; it is a form of governance. Through the differentiation of deservedness, the state:

Establishes regular relationships between state and society
Articulates particular identities and interests of Singaporeans as members of families, thereby undercutting alternative identities (gender, class, ethnic)
Generates norms about state-society relations and citizenship

The Limits of Reform

In "Interrogating the Limits of Welfare Reforms in Singapore" (Development and Change, 2015), Teo evaluates the Singapore government's welfare reforms in response to demographic shifts, economic pressures, and political demands. She finds that while the government has increased spending in certain areas, the reforms are structurally limited:

Most resources have been directed toward supporting businesses rather than citizens directly
Increases in direct spending on citizens have been limited and conditional rather than universal
Little or no attention has been paid to women's underemployment as a welfare issue
The fundamental logic of self-reliance and familialism remains unchanged despite incremental reforms

10. Gender, Motherhood, and Pro-Natalist Contradictions

Gendered State Rule

Teo's 2007 paper "Inequality for the Greater Good: Gendered State Rule in Singapore" (Critical Asian Studies) establishes the gender dimension of her critique. The paper argues that Singapore's family policies reproduce state power through three interconnected mechanisms:

They establish regular relationships between state and society through which the state maintains its authority
They articulate particular identities and interests of Singaporeans as members of families, thereby undercutting gender and ethnic identities that might serve as bases for collective mobilisation
They give content to notions of "tradition" and "modernity" that solidify the state's claim to being the only agent able to balance the twin tensions at the core of national survival

The Fundamental Contradiction

Teo identifies a structural contradiction in Singapore's approach to women and family:

The state's prioritisation of economic growth requires women's workforce participation. Rapid industrialisation offered greater education and employment opportunities for women, resulting in delayed and reduced marriage rates and, by the mid-1980s, below-replacement fertility. Many female graduates chose career over early marriage and childbearing.

The state's response was not to restructure the conditions of work and care to accommodate women's changed circumstances, but to implement pro-natalist incentives while simultaneously expecting women to continue working. The result is a double burden: women are expected to be both productive workers and reproductive mothers, with the state providing neither adequate childcare infrastructure nor workplace protections to make this feasible.

The Pro-Natalist Turn

The "pro-natalist" turn in the Singapore state's population policy occurred in the mid-1980s, when the "problem" was initially framed in eugenic terms: highly-educated women were not having enough children. The Graduate Mothers' Scheme, introduced by Lee Kuan Yew in 1984, offered incentives specifically to graduate mothers to have more children, while simultaneously offering financial incentives for sterilisation to less-educated women. Although the scheme was abandoned after public outcry, Teo argues that its logic --- differentiating the reproductive value of women by class and education --- persists in subtler forms throughout Singapore's family policy architecture.

Disproportionate Burdens

Many of Singapore's family policies place disproportionate burdens on women, particularly insofar as they reproduce "traditional" gendered divisions of labour within the household at the same time that they encourage women to participate in the formal workforce. The policies assume that women will be the primary caregivers regardless of their employment status, and structure benefits accordingly --- childcare leave policies, for instance, allocate far more leave to mothers than to fathers.

The Workfare Model

Singapore's approach to supporting low-income workers centres on the Workfare Income Supplement (WIS) scheme, which provides cash and CPF top-ups to low-wage workers. The philosophy underlying workfare is that work --- any work --- is the primary mechanism for self-improvement, and that the state's role is to supplement inadequate wages rather than to ensure adequate wages in the first place.

Teo's Critique

Teo's critique of the workfare approach operates on multiple levels:

Stigma and discouragement. Because a narrative of self-reliance relegates state assistance to the last resort, it deepens the stigma already associated with welfare recipients and discourages the vulnerable from seeking the entitlements they deserve. The system is designed to be difficult to access, to require extensive documentation, and to impose ongoing surveillance and conditionality --- all of which deter precisely the people who need help most.

Piecemeal rather than structural. The "Many Helping Hands" model, while appearing to mobilise community resources, produces poor coordination between stakeholders, resource constraints for front-line staff, and a piecemeal approach to social intervention. Families with multiple needs --- housing insecurity, health problems, childcare challenges, low wages --- must navigate multiple agencies, each with its own eligibility criteria and application processes.

Inadequacy. Workfare supplements are insufficient to lift families out of poverty. They top up wages that are themselves inadequate, without addressing the structural reasons why wages are so low (the absence of a minimum wage, the dependence on cheap foreign labour that suppresses wages in low-skilled sectors, the weak bargaining position of workers in the absence of independent unions).

Conditional rather than universal. Benefits are conditional on employment, family structure, and behaviour. Those who are unable to work --- due to disability, caregiving responsibilities, or simply the absence of available work --- fall outside the system entirely.

"Poor People Don't Like Oats Either"

In her essay for New Naratif, Teo crystallised the dignity problem with a vivid example: donated rations for low-income families often include oats --- a food that is not part of most Singaporeans' diets but that some corporate donors have apparently deemed "good for the poor." The title captures the broader point: social assistance systems that are designed around what donors and administrators think the poor should want, rather than what they actually need, replicate the power imbalance that produces poverty in the first place.

12. The Minimum Income Standards Project

Overview

Beginning in 2019, Teo co-led (with Dr Ng Kok Hoe of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS) a groundbreaking research project to establish Minimum Income Standards (MIS) for Singapore --- the first study of its kind in the country. The project is documented publicly at whatsenough.sg.

Methodology

The MIS research uses a consensus-building methodology adapted from the UK's MIS project. Focus groups of Singaporeans across different age groups and household types deliberate on what items and services are necessary for a basic standard of living. Expert panels then validate the budgets item by item, distinguishing needs from wants. The result is an empirically grounded, publicly legitimated benchmark for what a basic standard of living costs in Singapore.

Key Findings

2019 report: Focused on elderly persons aged 65 and older, and single adults aged 55--64. Established baseline budgets for these households.

2021 report (What People Need in Singapore: A Household Budgets Study): Extended the analysis to working-age households with children. Key finding: a family of four (two parents, two children) needs S$6,426 per month for a basic standard of living. The report defined a basic standard of living as encompassing not merely housing, food, and clothing, but also opportunities for education, employment and work-life balance, access to healthcare, and a sense of belonging, respect, security, and independence.

2023 report (Minimum Income Standard 2023: Household Budgets in a Time of Rising Costs): Updated prices and budgets in the context of post-pandemic inflation. Found that required budgets had increased by up to 5% due to rising costs. Compared MIS budgets to real incomes and various public schemes, demonstrating gaps between what people need and what the state provides.

Policy Significance

The MIS research is significant because it provides an evidence base for arguments about living wages, social assistance adequacy, and poverty measurement in Singapore. The government has long resisted defining a poverty line, arguing that such a line would be arbitrary and that Singapore's approach is to help individuals rather than to measure aggregate poverty. The MIS research challenges this position by demonstrating, through rigorous and publicly transparent methodology, what people actually need.

Following the launch of the 2021 report, Ng and Teo co-authored an op-ed in The Straits Times discussing the possible starting point for a living wage in Singapore, based on their household budget findings.

In a podcast interview with The Financial Coconut, Teo and Ng explained that S$6,693 (an updated figure) represents the minimum income standard in Singapore, providing a concrete and well-researched target for policy discussion.

13. Education as Care Labour

The Paper

"Education as Care Labor: Expanding Our Lens on the Work-Life Balance Problem," published in Current Sociology (2023, first online 2022), represents a significant extension of Teo's work on gender, class, and the structural production of inequality.

The Argument

The paper draws on interviews with 92 parents in Singapore. Its core argument is that education systems' demands have become a major component of parental care labour --- and that this has profound implications for both gender inequality and class inequality.

In Singapore's intensely competitive education environment, parents (and especially mothers) are expected to invest enormous time and effort in managing their children's education: supervising homework, arranging and ferrying children to tuition and enrichment activities, liaising with teachers, and navigating the complex system of school choices, streaming decisions, and examination preparation.

This "education care labour" is:

Gendered: Mothers bear disproportionate responsibility for education care labour, regardless of their employment status. In a context where education has intensified as parental responsibility, mothers and fathers feel compelled to take on different roles, with mothers typically assuming the primary role.
Classed: The resources required to perform education care labour effectively --- time, money, cultural capital, knowledge of the system --- are massively differentiated by class. Middle-class families can outsource aspects of this labour (to domestic helpers, tutors, enrichment centres); working-class families cannot.
Invisible: Because education care labour takes place in the domestic sphere and is performed primarily by women, it is largely invisible in policy discussions about work-life balance, which tend to focus on childcare for young children and on workplace flexibility, without recognising the enormous and ongoing demands of the education system on parental time and energy.

Implications

The paper challenges the framing of work-life balance as a problem solvable through better childcare provision or more flexible working arrangements. In a society where education has become one of the most intensive forms of care labour, genuine work-life balance requires rethinking the education system itself --- its competitiveness, its demands on families, and its role in reproducing class inequality.

The Singapore government launched the Forward Singapore exercise in 2022, with the stated aim of "refreshing" the social compact. The initiative, led by then-Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, sought to engage citizens in a conversation about the future direction of social policy, including discussions of social mobility, inequality, and the role of the state.

Teo has engaged with this discourse through multiple channels, including her 2022 speech at the Singapore Economic Policy Forum (published in edited form on Academia.SG as "Inequality and Social Good") and her 2024 essay "Ordinary People Dream" in the collection Why Not? Thinking about Singapore's Tomorrow.

"Ordinary People Dream" (2024)

This essay, published in a collection edited by Kanwaljit Soin and Margaret Thomas (World Scientific, 2024), represents Teo's most explicit articulation of what she believes Singapore needs in order to become a genuinely equitable society. The essay argues that ordinary people want:

Choice and autonomy --- the ability to make meaningful decisions about their lives
Belonging and respect --- social membership that is not conditional on economic productivity
Ethical agency --- the capacity to act in accordance with one's values

Teo argues that the current policy regime does not adequately enable these aspirations. Crucially, she contends that enabling conditions cannot be created merely by adjusting existing programmes:

The essay calls for a fundamental "reorientation of policy principles away from an individualistic and market-focused ethos and toward values of equality and mutual care." This goes beyond the Forward Singapore framing, which emphasises incremental adjustments within the existing framework, to argue for a structural transformation in how the state understands its obligations to citizens.

In her speech at the Singapore Economic Policy Forum 2022, Teo spoke about what ordinary people need to lead flourishing lives, the unequal wage work and care conditions people face, and the culture of individual hustle that these conditions generate. She argued that a new culture of shared wellbeing requires reforming a system that promotes individualism --- a direct challenge to the dominant ethos of Singapore governance.

15. Academic Freedom, POFMA, and the Right to Speak

"Academic Freedom in Singapore and the 'Fake News' Law" (2019)

When the Singapore government was preparing to pass the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) in 2019, Teo published an essay in New Naratif addressing a dimension of the debate that had received insufficient attention: the implications for academic freedom. She argued that laws against "fake news," when administered by a government with wide discretion over what constitutes falsehood, create a chilling effect on academic research and public commentary, particularly on politically sensitive topics like inequality, race, and social policy.

"Speaking Out of Turn" (2019)

In October 2019, Teo published a blog post titled "Speaking Out of Turn" that became one of her most widely shared pieces of writing. The essay was prompted by the broader climate of debate in Singapore around who has the right to speak on public issues and on what terms. Teo argued:

"In a democratic society --- the one we want to live in --- there should be no such thing as speaking out of turn."

She observed that in contemporary Singapore, contentious issues "devolve into mud-slinging rather quickly as people with more power tell others that they lack the 'substantive right to voice.'" She argued:

"A democratic society is one where people have rights --- substantive, and not just as formality --- to have thoughts and express them. A harmonious society requires safe spaces for diverse persons to speak so that we can figure out how to live together."

And:

"There is no public debate without public space, no new ideas can be generated that help us live better together, if only some voices can speak."

This essay was a defence not merely of academic freedom in the narrow sense, but of the democratic principle that all citizens --- not only those with credentials, official positions, or government approval --- have the right to participate in public discourse about the society they live in.

16. COVID-19 and Structural Inequality

The Pandemic as Amplifier

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck Singapore in 2020, Teo was among the first voices to argue that the crisis revealed and amplified pre-existing structural inequalities. The pandemic's disproportionate impact on migrant workers --- with approximately 90% of all infections in Singapore occurring among construction workers living in overcrowded dormitories --- validated arguments that Teo and other scholars had been making for years about the structural vulnerabilities created by Singapore's economic model.

"Crisis Is Exactly the Time to Make Structural Changes"

In a co-authored essay with Ng Kok Hoe on Academia.SG (2020), Teo argued that the pandemic was precisely the moment to make structural changes to address poverty and inequality, rather than treating the crisis as a temporary disruption after which the pre-existing system could be restored. She emphasised that the crisis "amplified vulnerabilities and precarity for those who were already vulnerable and precarious" and urged maintaining "inequality as a lens in any analysis and discussion of the pandemic and responses to it."

Differentiated Deservedness in Pandemic Response

Teo reflected on how the concepts developed in her earlier academic work --- differentiated deservedness and neoliberal morality --- helped explain Singapore's pandemic response. The differential treatment of citizens and migrant workers, the reliance on employers rather than the state for migrant worker welfare, and the piecemeal nature of support measures all reflected the structural features of Singapore's welfare regime that she had analysed in her pre-pandemic work.

17. Public Quotations: A Compendium

On Inequality and Meritocracy

"Inequality, in fact, is a logical outcome of meritocracy."

"Meritocracy is a system that legitimizes those who end up as victors, casting them as individuals who have succeeded on their own hard work and intelligence rather than on any inherited unfair advantages. It is also a system that tells us a specific story about failures, casting those as individual lacks rather than systemic disadvantages."

"Singaporeans live in a social and cultural milieu that encourages and compels an individualist mode of conceptualizing reality: individuals are unique, each person makes his or her own choices, chooses their own path, with the sentiment 'In the end, it's up to the individual.'"

On Dignity and Human Worth

"The respect I am accorded are conditional on my participation in society as an economically productive and relatively wealthy person. It has little to do with my inherent right to respect as a human being and member of this society."

"In an ideal world, dignity doesn't have an expiration date attached to economic productivity. It affirms the worth of personhood. It feels different from what we have."

"No one should have to be super in order to be human."

On Parenting and Class

"To have one's parenting practices be unintelligible, unacknowledged, deemed less worthy, is a profound form of attack on the self, especially when being a parent is a central part of one's identity."

"When I go about my day with people addressing me as 'Prof Teo' and my respondent goes about her day cleaning toilets as people pass her by without seeing her, these are the concrete experiences that shape our sense of belonging and of who we are."

On Power and Choice

"We who have the power to make choices disproportionately shape outcomes and limit options for people who don't have the power to make choices. It follows that if we don't share the power to make choices, we will never see a change to those things we say are bad or unacceptable to our society."

"People sitting in positions of authority are powerful not because they feel empowered but because they have power. Their feelings of empowerment are an outcome of their actual ownership of power, not the cause."

On Family and Rights

"Given the centrality of the family for well-being in this society, we should have the right not just to form families, but to give and receive care, and to build meaningful and dignified lives."

On Democratic Society and Speech

"In a democratic society --- the one we want to live in --- there should be no such thing as speaking out of turn."

"A democratic society is one where people have rights --- substantive, and not just as formality --- to have thoughts and express them."

"There is no public debate without public space, no new ideas can be generated that help us live better together, if only some voices can speak."

18. Impact and Reception of "This Is What Inequality Looks Like"

Sales and Commercial Success

This Is What Inequality Looks Like became a publishing phenomenon by Singapore standards:

Sold approximately 25,000 copies within 16 months of publication (January 2018)
Exceeded 30,000 copies within three years
Spent 38 consecutive weeks on The Straits Times bestsellers list
These figures are extraordinary for a Singapore-published non-fiction book by a local academic, and particularly remarkable for a work of sociology that does not shy away from structural critique

The book was published by Ethos Books, a small literary press, rather than by an academic publisher or a major commercial house. Its success demonstrated that there was a vast, underserved readership for serious writing about inequality in Singapore --- a topic that the mainstream media and political establishment had long treated as either taboo or as a problem already being adequately addressed.

Parliamentary Impact

The book was quoted in Parliament, most notably during the July 2018 debate on education, meritocracy, and inequality. Education Minister Ong Ye Kung's parliamentary speech on 11 July 2018 --- in which he urged Singaporeans not to "lose faith" in meritocracy and called for "doubling down" on meritocracy by broadening its definition --- was widely understood as a response to the public conversation that Teo's book had catalysed.

The fact that a sitting cabinet minister felt compelled to respond to an academic's book in Parliament was itself a measure of the book's impact. Singapore's political system rarely produces moments in which academic critiques compel direct governmental response.

Public Discourse

The book sparked extended national debates in multiple arenas:

Parliamentary speeches and policy responses
Letters to newspaper editors in The Straits Times and other publications
Social media discussion across Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms
Book discussions and reading groups across Singapore
Academic conferences and seminars
Civil society events organised by AWARE, social service organisations, and community groups

The book's impact went beyond the conventional academic-to-policy pipeline. It reached ordinary readers --- parents, students, social workers, teachers, civil servants --- and provided them with a vocabulary and analytical framework for understanding experiences of inequality that they had observed but lacked the language to articulate.

Critical Reception

Academic reviewers in journals including Pacific Affairs (UBC) and New Mandala (ANU) praised the book for its ethnographic depth, its accessibility, and its structural analysis. The Pacific Affairs review noted that Teo's arguments "pose a sobering challenge for Singaporean society" by demonstrating that "systems shape individual outcomes" and that addressing poverty requires "changing prevailing narratives and how Singaporeans think about privilege, poverty, and inequality."

Awards and Nominations

The book's impact led directly to several recognitions:

Finalist, The Straits Times Singaporean of the Year 2018 --- for igniting a national conversation on poverty and inequality
The nomination was itself remarkable: an academic sociologist was placed alongside politicians, athletes, and business leaders as a candidate for the country's most prominent public recognition

19. Debates and Positioning: Against the Establishment Narrative

The Government's Meritocracy Defence

Teo's most significant intellectual antagonist is not any individual but the governing ideology itself. The PAP government's response to the inequality conversation catalysed by her book has followed a consistent pattern:

Acknowledge the problem --- Ministers have increasingly used the language of inequality, social mobility, and "levelling up" (a term adopted in recent years)
Reaffirm meritocracy --- Rather than questioning meritocracy as a principle, the government argues for refining and broadening it. Ong Ye Kung's 2018 parliamentary speech exemplified this: he acknowledged that meritocracy can lead to "systemic unfairness" when advantaged families invest disproportionately in their children, but argued that the solution is more meritocracy (broadly defined), not less
Point to incremental reforms --- Increased spending on early childhood education, the progressive wage model, ComCare enhancements, and other measures are presented as evidence that the government is addressing inequality within its existing framework
Resist structural reframing --- The government has consistently resisted Teo's call for a fundamental reorientation of policy principles, maintaining that Singapore's approach of targeted, means-tested support is more effective and fiscally sustainable than universal social protection

Teo vs the Incrementalist Position

The intellectual divide between Teo and the government establishment is not about whether inequality exists (both acknowledge it) but about its causes and remedies:

The establishment position (articulated by various ministers and by policy academics like Terence Ho, author of Governing Well: Reflections on Singapore and Beyond and Refreshing the Singapore System): Inequality is a challenge to be managed through careful policy calibration within the existing framework. The system's basic architecture --- meritocracy, self-reliance, familialist welfare, targeted assistance --- is sound; it needs refinement, not replacement.

Teo's position: The system's basic architecture is itself the problem. Inequality is not a bug in the system but a feature --- an outcome of how the system is designed. Incremental reforms within the existing framework will always be insufficient because they leave the fundamental logic of individualised responsibility, differentiated deservedness, and conditional dignity intact. What is needed is a reorientation "away from an individualistic and market-focused ethos and toward values of equality and mutual care."

CNA's "Regardless of Class" Documentary

When CNA aired its documentary series "Regardless of Class" (exploring social mixing and class divides in Singapore), Teo offered pointed commentary. She argued that poor social mixing is a side effect of inequality, not its root cause. The documentary's focus on interpersonal encounters between rich and poor, she suggested, deflected attention from the structural conditions --- wage compression, housing segregation, educational sorting --- that produce class division in the first place.

This critique exemplified Teo's consistent methodological commitment: the problem is structural, not interpersonal. Addressing inequality requires changing institutions, policies, and systems, not merely encouraging individual acts of empathy or "exposure" to those from different backgrounds.

The Poverty Line Debate

Singapore has long resisted establishing an official poverty line, arguing that such a line would be arbitrary and that the government's approach is to help individuals based on their specific circumstances rather than to categorise them by income thresholds. Teo's MIS research directly challenges this position by demonstrating, through rigorous and publicly transparent methodology, what people actually need --- and by showing that many Singaporean households fall below that threshold.

The government's resistance to defining poverty is, in Teo's analysis, itself a form of governance: by refusing to measure poverty, the state avoids accountability for it. The MIS research creates an independent benchmark against which government policy can be evaluated, and in doing so constitutes a form of what Teo and her colleague Ng Kok Hoe have described as "practising dissent" through policy research.

20. Awards and Recognition

Nanyang Education Award, NTU (2013) --- recognising excellence in teaching
Feminist Scholar Activist Award, American Sociological Association (ASA), Sex and Gender Section (2016) --- recognising scholarship that combines academic rigour with activist commitment to gender equality
Finalist, The Straits Times Singaporean of the Year (2018) --- for contributions to igniting a national conversation on poverty and inequality
AWARE Woman of Insight Award (2019) --- awarded at AWARE's annual Time Traveller's Ball alongside Monica Baey and Liyana Dhamirah
Provost's Chair in Sociology, NTU --- an endowed chair recognising sustained distinction in research

21. Assessment: The Teo You Yenn Contribution

Intellectual Significance

Teo You Yenn occupies a position in Singapore's intellectual landscape that no one else has filled. Before This Is What Inequality Looks Like, there was no widely read, locally authored book that made the structural production of inequality in Singapore visible to a general readership. Academic research on inequality existed, but it circulated within specialist journals and seminar rooms. Government statistics on income distribution were available, but they were framed within a narrative of progress and upliftment. Teo's achievement was to bridge the gap between academic analysis and public understanding, producing a work that is simultaneously rigorous sociology and accessible, deeply human storytelling.

The Method: Ethnography as Political Act

Teo's choice of ethnographic method --- spending years in the homes and lives of low-income Singaporeans, listening to their stories, documenting their everyday struggles --- is itself a political act in a society where the dominant mode of policy analysis is quantitative, technocratic, and top-down. By insisting on the primacy of lived experience, Teo challenges the epistemological foundations of Singapore's policy establishment, which has historically preferred to govern by data, targets, and KPIs rather than by engagement with the messy, particular, and often uncomfortable realities of people's lives.

The Structural Lens

Teo's most enduring intellectual contribution may be her consistent insistence on the structural lens. Where the dominant Singapore narrative explains poverty as individual failure (lack of effort, poor choices, inadequate skills), Teo explains it as institutional production. Where the dominant narrative treats inequality as an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise successful system, Teo treats it as a systemic outcome of how that system is designed. This structural lens --- applied across housing, education, welfare, employment, gender, and family policy --- constitutes a comprehensive alternative framework for understanding Singapore society.

The Limits of Influence

It is important to note the limits of Teo's influence on actual policy outcomes. While her work has shifted public discourse and forced the government to engage with inequality more explicitly than it did before 2018, the fundamental architecture of Singapore's welfare regime remains largely intact. The government has made incremental changes --- expanding ComCare, introducing the progressive wage model, increasing early childhood education spending, launching Forward Singapore --- but has not undertaken the structural reorientation that Teo argues is necessary.

This gap between discursive impact and policy change is itself revealing. It suggests that Teo has won the argument about whether inequality is a problem (a proposition that was contested before her book), but has not yet won the argument about what to do about it. The establishment's response has been to absorb the language of inequality into its own framework while resisting the structural conclusions that Teo draws from the evidence.

Positioning in Singapore's Intellectual Ecology

Teo is not a political activist; she is an academic who insists on the public relevance of academic knowledge. She has been careful to position herself not as an opponent of the government but as a scholar whose work reveals truths that are uncomfortable but necessary for a society that claims to value meritocracy and social progress. This positioning --- critical but not oppositional, engaged but not partisan --- has allowed her to maintain her institutional standing at NTU while pushing public discourse further than any Singapore-based academic has done on questions of class and inequality.

In the taxonomy of Singapore's public intellectuals, Teo represents a distinct species: the engaged sociologist who combines academic rigour with public accessibility, structural analysis with ethnographic empathy, and intellectual independence with institutional survival. Her work has permanently altered the terms of debate about inequality in Singapore, even if the policy outcomes she advocates remain unrealised.

Document compiled for the Singapore Governance Corpus. This intellectual profile draws on published academic works, books, public essays, media interviews, and publicly available biographical information.

SG-H-THINK-14 | Teo You Yenn --- The Sociologist Who Made Singapore See Its Poor: Inequality, Dignity, and the Unmaking of Meritocratic Myth

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