Combining Egalitarian Working Lives with Traditional Attitudes: Gender Role Attitudes in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea

In a simple theoretical framework, egalitarian gender role attitudes emerge as more and more women participate in the labor market. Most advanced Western nations enjoy relatively gender-egalitarian working environments, and consequently more egalitarian gender attitudes than their East Asian counterparts. Women in East Asian societies, on the other hand, are said to support both the conditions resulting in stagnant female labor-force participation and traditional attitudes toward gender roles. In Taiwan, however, women are more economically active than in two other East Asian societies—Japan and South Korea—even though women in all three societies favor the traditional gender division of labor. Thus, in Taiwan, women experiencing inconsistencies between their active working lives and their traditional values. This study hypothesizes that this inconsistency, or the coexistence of the old and the new, is reflected in the very mind-set of women. Using comparative data from the 2006 East Asian Social Survey, we analyzed the gap between responses to questions on gender attitudes in relation to working conditions, and other general gender role attitudes. We found there were significant differences in the size of these gaps. Taiwanese women expressed more egalitarian views insofar as the questions were concerned with practical economic interests, while they retained their basic traditional attitudes towards gender roles in their homes. This gap is larger in Taiwan than in Japan or South Korea.