I have discovered that being male and not the main breadwinner in a family is something of a rarity in Singapore, where I suspect husbands are regarded as the chief income earners, and more conservative views of gender roles tend to prevail.

In my situation, the position of being the junior earner is down to the simple fact that investment bankers tend to get paid more than humble hacks.

And the net salary and benefit package my wife was offered to relocate from London to Singapore was too good to turn down.

As a married couple, it was a simple maths exercise that her career should take precedence over mine.

While this state of affairs might not be something that Singaporean men would identify with, I have discovered that my situation is pretty common within the Caucasian expat community here. I have lost count of the number of wives we have encountered here holding down the main job, with their husbands left to work in less well-paid jobs - or with no work at all.

Many women in Europe are now in jobs that they loath to give up.

They have moved up the greasy pole and accrued better pay and benefits along the way, so the cost of becoming a housewife is much greater than had they been working in the sort of clerical or secretarial job that used to be more common for women 20 or 30 years ago.

My own job involves working through the evening, so some of my days are taken up looking after our three-year-old son. (At other times, our maid takes over.) Such childcare usually involves cycling trips, visits to the zoo, museums, East Coast Park, Sentosa and the shopping malls.

On such excursions, I find the reactions of people here very different from the ones I am used to back home.

In London, no one would bat an eyelid to see a man feeding a three-year-old in a restaurant or changing a nappy (something, thankfully, my son grew out of a long time ago), but here you can't help but notice the bemused look on the faces of some Singaporeans, both male and female.

The question running through their minds must obviously be, 'Where is the mum or the maid?'

While it must seem a strange role reversal for Singaporeans, I am sure it must appear really bizarre for the foreign domestic maids when they see what they must presume to be the chief income earner of the family pushing a pram or playing with a child during a weekday.

The look on the faces of the maids I encounter is one of puzzlement, and even a little job demarcation pique that a man should be looking after a young boy - a job, they obviously think, rather quaintly, should be undertaken only by the mum or the maid.

On one occasion, I was even approached by a helper in a shopping centre who said that she knew of a maid looking for employment and volunteered her telephone number to me. When I explained that we already had a maid and, wherever possible, we preferred for our son to spend time with his parents, she looked even more perplexed.

Childcare as 'adult recreation' rather than 'chore' was something, apparently, that had never occurred to her.

The attitude that has men as the breadwinners and not the child carers in any shape or form has long gone out the window in Europe, where the luxury of having a maid is reserved for millionaires (given the relatively high minimum wage rate there).

There, men can find that their wives' careers outpace their own and, because the grandparents may live hundreds of miles away, they are forced to do a lot of the running around and childcare that traditionally would be done by the woman.

So, please, if on a Monday morning you see a Caucasian father calming a crying toddler in the supermarket, attending playgroup, or feeding junior in McDonald's, have a thought for the circumstances that have led him to his not-universally-envied predicament.

The writer, who is English, is a Straits Times copy editor. He has lived in Singapore for 19 months with his wife and their three-year-old child, Alex.

This article was first published in The Sunday Times.