Goddaughter scheme: Worker says manager shows blatant favouritism towards female employee who only works half days

SINGAPORE: A local worker took to social media to spill the tea on what he calls his company’s “goddaughter scheme,” where the manager handpicks his favourite female employee, showers her with the best opportunities, and shields her from any kind of criticism.

In his post on a local forum, the worker claimed that the manager has bent more than a few company rules just to keep this one employee comfortable.

According to him, this particular employee only shows up for half a day most of the time, and whenever she finally strolls in, the manager immediately calls her over for a personal update session, as if the whole team’s job is to keep her in the loop.

To make things even more convenient, every meeting she needs to attend is pushed to at least 11 a.m., so she never has to bother with early mornings like everyone else.

Her privileges don’t stop there either. The worker said that during company events, she skips the morning entirely, only showing up when it’s time to take photos or socialise and vanishing right after. “Recently, there was a company lunch, and she didn’t come in the morning. She just appeared at the lunch and then she went straight home after,” he said.

To top it all off, the manager constantly insists she’s “very busy,” even though, according to the worker, everyone knows she only does the “flashy first part” of a project to impress the higher-ups, then dumps the remaining work on her teammates without giving them any credit.

He went on to share that the team has already tried confronting the manager about the obvious bias, but instead of addressing the issue, the manager brushed it off with a smug “Don’t be so defensive.”

Frustrated, the worker turned to the online community to ask if blatant favouritism like this is really that ‘common in Singapore’ and whether employees are just expected to put up with it. “Is there really nothing we can do about it?” he asked.

“This happens all around the world.”

Unfortunately, none of the Singaporean Redditors who weighed in supported the worker. While they were equally frustrated by the blatant favouritism, they pointed out that such behaviour has, regrettably, become common in many workplaces.

“Disgusting and the definition of a toxic environment, but this is normal… over here also,” one said.

“Haha, this is the real Society University. You have to deal with it. It’s all part of life and human nature. If you have been in the working world for some years, you should already know this. Unless you are a young newbie graduate?” another wrote

How naive and entitled can you be? This happens all around the world. We are humans. You’d show favouritism too,” a third added.

In other news, a local fresh graduate took to social media to vent that all 20 interviews he attended through MyCareersFuture ended with employers finding one excuse after another not to hire him, leading him to suspect that some companies were just posting jobs on the platform to “tick boxes”.

Posting on the r/SingaporeRaw subreddit on Friday (Oct 24), he explained that the interviews he got through JobStreet and LinkedIn felt way more genuine and constructive.

Read more: Fresh grad suspects job listings on MyCareersFuture are ‘just for show’, claims employers always find excuses not to hire him