Everyday Gender at Work in Taiwan

Ting-Fang Chin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789811073656
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Feminismus & feministische Theorie

This book explores professional women's experiences of gender in the Taiwanese workplace in the wake of the rapid transformation of the country's economy, identifying attitudes to gender in a heterosexist and heteronormative social culture. It contributes to understanding women's relationships with their superiors and peers at work and the strategies that they have used to negotiate with these role partners to achieve their own personal and career goals.It notes that compared to women in other East Asian economies, women in Taiwan have a more consistent career trajectory and that the local women's movement and activism has brought Taiwan a long way in improving women's employment rights, but argues that it is too soon to claim that gender inequality has been banished from the workplace. Based on qualitative, in-depth interviews, the book explores the participants' accounts, gendered and heteronormative practices at work, in two contexts: organisational management and everyday social encounters. It investigates gender inequality at work by focusing on women employees' everyday experiences, and examines structural and institutional factors affecting gendered arrangements, as well as personal experiences in negotiating gender. A key read for students and scholars in gender and employment studies, this book will also be of interest to those working within the field of employment sociology and organisational culture.

© The Author(s) 2018

Ting-Fang ChinEveryday Gender at Work in TaiwanGender, Sexualities and Culture in Asiahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7365-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Setting the Coordinates for an Intellectual Map of Gender, Work and Taiwan

Ting-Fang Chin¹

(1)

University of York, York, UK

End Abstract

Introduction

In Taiwan, the metaphor ‘knowledge is an ocean’ was a fairly common trope when I was a schoolgirl. Tutors would advise their students that studying hard is the only way to survive and reach one’s destination. While school education at that time (and perhaps even now) was organised around compulsory memorising and exam-taking activities, this well-intentioned advice sounded intimidating rather than encouraging. It implied that studying is a matter of life or death, as if one were struggling alone and helplessly in the open water. My peers joked that, since the ocean is so difficult to cross, the best way to survive is to turn back rather than to move forward.

I recalled this metaphor at an early stage of this study on gender at work in Taiwanese society, not because I felt intimidated during the process (although I did have a few difficult moments), but because knowledge has presented itself like a boundless ocean in front of me. Next, the imagery of travelling from one location to another came to my aid. In a way, the thought that I was undertaking a journey was useful in helping me to make sense of the critical context of this study. If knowledge is the sea, then the main task for me as a researcher is not to investigate every drop of it but to discover where I am and, therefore, which direction I should be heading. As long as I have made proper preparations, I can travel in this ocean of knowledge. It will carry me rather than devour me.

This chapter is about the preparations I made in order to take this journey of knowledge. I introduce previous studies that constituted the academic context of my own exploration. I identify gender, work and Taiwan as the main coordinates on my knowledge map in this quest. I depend on them to confirm and reflect my own location during this intellectual exploration. I deliberately give empirical studies on Taiwanese society the central position in this literature review. I am certainly aware of the existence of ‘Western’ findings, but this is not the intellectual route I have chosen to take and they are of limited relevance to Taiwan. I begin by reviewing research that depicts the economic and social background in relation to women’s employment in Taiwan. Second, I introduce studies that have helped me to re-contextualise East Asian and therefore Taiwanese society. My focus then shifts to the theories that have influenced my conceptualisation of women’s labour and gender.

Picturing Employed Women in Taiwan

The rapid and ‘successful’ transformation of the Taiwanese economy and its distinct gender patterns in employment have brought the country some sociological attention in the global knowledge market. The former has drawn researchers to investigate women’s roles in this transformation and how their social status has been influenced by the economic shifts. The latter poses puzzles for sociological examination of the relationship between women’s labour-market participation and the social conditions of gender inequality.

Like other East Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea , Taiwan is among the latecomers to industrialisation that have demonstrated impressive achievements. During the 1960s, with aid from the United States, the Kuomintang (KMT) regime drove Taiwan onto a path of labour-intensive and export-led economic development. While male officials and politicians often took the credit for the ‘economic miracle’ and occupied the spotlight, it was actually a fruitful result gained primarily at the expense of women’s sweat and even blood, such as in the case of RCA (see Arrigo 1985; Chen 2011b). For example, the primary members of the labour force that supported production in the Free Trade Zones (FTZs) were women. The working life of female factory workers in Taiwan during that era has been well documented in previous studies (e.g. Kung 1978; Diamond 1979; Hsiung 1996). This research has shown that the booming economic development in Taiwan has actually been accomplished by relying heavily on gendered social institutions and arrangements.

With the continuing transformation of the economy within the context of international markets, social changes have occurred in Taiwan and, therefore, the focus of academic investigations into women’s employment has shifted. Since the mid-1990s, Taiwan’s economy has become ‘much more diversified, and industries have been upgraded and become more capital intensive’ (Lee 2004: 75). The industrial structure has been redirected away from low-skilled toward high-skilled manufacturing, and the economy has become service-oriented. Meanwhile, accompanying its repositioning in the system of global capitalism, Taiwan has become a site for examining local and migrant women’s employment and how the lives of these two groups have intersected (see Lan 2003b, 2006). It has been shown that, during the second half of the twentieth century, Taiwan experienced rapid economic transformation, which was accompanied by massive social changes. Within just a few decades, the economic structure shifted from agriculture-oriented to industrialised and then post-industrialised. This very much fits the character of what Chang (1999, 2010) conceptualises as ‘compressed modernity’.

In the context of the continuous transformation of the economy, there is one distinct and sustained characteristic of women’s employment that has attracted researchers’ attention. Compared with other rapidly developing economies in East Asia , statistics have shown that Taiwan has a consistently high and steady rate of women’s labour-force participation. This persistent pattern has been manifested not only in women’s labour as a whole over the years but also in terms of individual women’s life trajectories. Women in Taiwan tend to stay in their jobs even after marrying and having children. Brinton et al. (1995) use statistics on married women’s employment in Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s to examine explanatory models of women’s labour-force participation. They identify three major differences in these two societies. First, in the 25–34 year-old age group, the so-called proper childbearing age, while many Korean women tended to stay out of the labour market, women’s labour participation in Taiwan remained steady. Second, married women in Taiwan largely acquired formal jobs at any age, while their Korean counterparts were mostly in informal ones. The last salient difference is the relationship between education and women’s employment. In Taiwan, a woman’s level of education has a positive influence on the probability of her employment. In the case of South Korea , it is the opposite. A similar pattern also emerges in the comparison between Taiwan and Japan . It has been suggested in later studies that the comparatively steady employment trajectory of women in Taiwan has survived the societal changes driven by economic transformation (see Yu 2009; Sechiyama 2013).

However, this steady employment pattern cannot be regarded as an absolute answer to the enquiry about gender equality in the workplace. The fact that women tend to stay in the workplace does not mean they have been treated equally with their male counterparts. One obvious gender inequality at work is the gender pay gap. Examining the gender patterns of quantitative data about employment in Taiwan, Zveglich and Meulen Rogers (2004) aim to provide an explanation for the persistent and even increasing gender pay gaps. They find that, while equal opportunities for women to access education and experience have increased, they are nevertheless paid considerably less than men. The authors suggest that ‘substantial within-occupations pay gaps between men and women are the main source of Taiwan’s overall gender wage gap’ (ibid.: 867). Moreover, they point out that within-occupation pay gaps actually ‘grew over time and contributed to a substantial decline in women’s relative wages after controlling for their gains in education and experience’ (ibid.: 867). In other words, women in Taiwan do not receive equal pay for equal work. These findings suggest that there is a persistent inequality in payment across the spectrum of occupations. Later studies have suggested that a less visible gender segregation might be occurring in employment in Taiwan. In their quantitative data-based study, Chang and England (2011) use data from 2006 to look at the pay gaps in South Korea , Japan and Taiwan. Their study finds that Taiwan has a smaller gender gap in earnings, but the variables they examined could not fully explain the reasons for the gap. They suspect that the pay gap in Taiwan might be partially due to discriminatory practices in hiring or ‘supply-side preferences’ which could not be examined through employment statistics (ibid.: 13). Moreover, ‘the remaining unexplained portion of the gap may reflect discriminatory wage differences between men and women in the same occupation’ (ibid.: 13).

Research also reveals that the high labour-force participation of women does not necessarily mean they are free from gendered labour in the domestic sphere. In her work on married women’s lives in Taiwan and Japan , Yu (2001) aims to provide an explanation for the seeming disparity between married women’s attitudes towards conventional ideas about gender and their consistent employment in Taiwan. She proposes that the reasons for this inconsistency could be revealed by investigating ‘structural conditions’. By examining the differences in ‘cultural and socio-economic context’ in Taiwan and Japan , she identifies several factors relating to the demands on financial resources and requirements for childcare and homemaking. She concludes that ‘the fact that many married women in Taiwan play a role in supporting the household economy does not seem to actually shake their belief that a wife should be the primary caregiver in the household’ (ibid.: 94). Furthermore, providing financial support for the family is commonly viewed as a way to take care of family members, especially children. Yu’s research demonstrates the different social norms relating to motherhood in Taiwanese and Japanese society. In Taiwan, being a mother does not mean that a woman can escape the responsibility of contributing financially to the family. On the other hand, having a full-time job does not excuse her from caring labour in the household. Yu’s interview data shows that women are still the main caregivers in their families, just as much as their Japanese counterparts. Married women in Taiwan are usually carrying a double burden as a result of their dual roles in the workplace and at home. This, then, raises questions about women’s everyday practices and the management of this dual burden of labour.

In later research, Yu (2009) provides explanations for the socio-economic conditions that enable married Taiwanese ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Setting the Coordinates for an Intellectual Map of Gender, Work and Taiwan
• 2. Lost and Found in the Field: Methodology and the Research Process
• 3. Being Employed as a ‘Nyusheng’: Gendered and Heteronormative Management in the Workplace
• 4. ‘Don’t I Have a Brain and Hands?’: Negotiating Gender in Mundane Interactions at Work
• 5. ‘I Feel You Should Eat Shit’: Picturing the Agency of the Misfit Self in the Workplace
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter