Ebook The Gap Remains: Gender and Earnings in Taiwan
Over the past three decades, Taiwan has experienced tremendous economic growth. Heralded as part of the “Asian Economic Miracle,” Taiwan saw double digit rises in GDP through much of the 1980’s. On average, from 1979 to 1990, real GDP grew at an annual rate of over 6% in dollar terms. In comparison, Singapore experienced growth of 5.3%, Hong Kong growth of 5.8%, and Korea growth of 6.6% annually over the same time period (Summers and Heston 1991).
With economic growth has come a change in the composition of GDP. Taiwan has moved away from a focus on light manufacturing toward a focus on the service sector and commercial areas. The percentage of GDP originating from manufacturing reached a peak at 39% in 1986, then declined to around 28% by 1996. Concurrently, the percentage of GDP originating from commerce, finance, and business services rose from 26% to 38% (Huang 1998).
Along with these changes in output composition have come changes in the composition of the labor force. Table 1 gives the percentage of workers in various broadly defined industry groups by sex and year. We can see that there has been a rapid decline in the percentage of workers in the manufacturing industry in the latter part of the period under study, a decline that is especially precipitous for women. In fact women’s movement out of light manufacturing exceeds men’s by nearly ten percentage points. We can also see that the percentage of workers in the agricultural sector has declined rapidly over the years, with the sharpest decline in the early to mid-1980’s. Large differentials in changes between men and women appear in commerce and the social and personal services industries; women’s entry into these industries has been more rapid than men’s.
At the same time, the average educational attainment of workers in Taiwan’s population has risen dramatically. While in 1979 the median Taiwanese worker had only a primary school education, by 1995, 50% of the potential labor force had at least a high school diploma (see Table 2). For women, the increase has been even more dramatic. In 1979, fully 70% of women ages 20-69 had only a primary school education or less. By 1995, that number had dropped to 39%. Over the same period, the percentage of working-aged women with vocational or university level training jumped from 16% to 37%, an increase of 231%. The analogous increase for men was 176% (see Table 2 for details). In fact, in recent years, nearly equal numbers of men and women have enrolled in universities in Taiwan (Ministry of Education 1996).
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