Differences in Gender-Role Attitudes between China and Taiwan

Introduction

Taiwan and mainland China both inherited a Confucian cultural heritage, but have experienced different political, social, and economic development and institutional arrangements over the past century. After a period of Japanese colonization, Taiwan transitioned from an authoritarian to a democratic regime while undergoing rapid industrialization, whereas China has remained an authoritarian socialist polity since the end of the communist revolution in 1949, and did not embark on socioeconomic reforms until the late 1970s. The distinct social and economic trajectories of the two societies have given rise to different gender relationships and values. The study reported herein investigated the impact of socioeconomic forces and cultural traditions on differences in gender-role attitudes across the Taiwan Strait.

The two societies have pluses and minuses with regard to the progress they have made toward gender equality. For example, based on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index (GII) for 2012, the Taiwanese government reports the country to have the second highest gender equality ranking in the world, higher than neighboring China, Japan, or South Korea (Liu, 2013).¹ Across the Strait, China’s female labor participation rate was among the highest in the world during the Mao era, remained above 70% in the late 1980s and 1990s,² and the gender wage gap is remarkably small by international standards (Maurer-Fazio, Hughes, & Zhang, 2007; Cook & Dong, 2011). The primary challenge in this study was to establish appropriate measures of gender equality in the respective societies and to compare the differences between them. An inequitable division of labor between the public and private spheres for men and women grants the former the advantage of control and relegates the latter to an inferior social and economic status (Plutzer, 1988). This paper examines the attitudes toward family and work life held by individuals in mainland China and Taiwan for the purpose of comparing the two societies’ gender-role designations.

The paper also traces why gender-role attitudes differ in the two societies. Research comparing gender-role attitudes in Taiwan and China is relatively scarce and inconsistent. Chia, Allred, and Jerzak (1997) argued that, owing to the two societies’ differing degrees of modernization, women in Taiwan generally hold more egalitarian attitudes than their counterparts on the mainland. Hsieh and Burgess (1994), in contrast, found the mainland Chinese to display more egalitarian views of marital roles than the Taiwanese. They argued that although capitalist societies tend to offer women more employment and education opportunities and adopt more egalitarian gender attitudes as they modernize and industrialize, the pace of change is relatively slow compared with socialist societies in which the state can implement top-down policies imposing such values. In comparing urban China and Taiwan, Cornman, Chen, and Hermalin (2003) noted that although Taiwan is more economically advanced, its family structure remains more traditional than that in highly bureaucratized China. Hence, socialist-capitalist institutional arrangements appear to be more important to family structures than the level of economic development per se. Others have argued that socialist societies do not necessarily have more egalitarian attitudes than their capitalist counterparts, but rather a smaller gender gap in those attitudes (Braun, Scott, & Alwin, 1994; Tu & Liao, 2005).³

These inconsistent findings highlight the importance of considering various theoretical factors in explaining gender-role attitudinal differences. Given their shared cultural heritage, the different perceptions of gender equality in Taiwan and China may be attributable to their different socioeconomic systems and societal transformations, which have weakened or strengthened existing cultural practices to differing extents. Here, socioeconomic institutions and developments are considered crucial explanatory factors in the two societies’ divergent gender-role attitudes.

However, as their socioeconomic differences have narrowed over time, their attitudinal differences might also be expected to have gradually faded away. Hence, the paper also examines whether the gap in cross-strait gender-role attitudes has shrunk or expanded over time. The study hypothesized that the gap has shrunk in conjunction with growing socioeconomic similarity. To test that hypothesis, I compared cross-cohort variations in gender-role attitudes in both countries. The results show the cross-strait attitudinal gap to indeed be more pronounced in the older generations, who were socialized under starkly different socioeconomic systems, with the gap gradually narrowing as those systems have converged.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the theoretical explanations for gender-role attitudinal changes and compares the different trajectories of gender attitude-related social, political, and economic developments in China and Taiwan. Section 3 presents data on attitudes toward gender equality in the two societies from the 2012 World Values Survey (WVS), and employs WVS answers on women’s work and family roles to generate a typology of cross-strait gender-role attitudinal differences. Finally, Section 4 models the cross-strait attitude differences using a multinomial logit model, and Section 5 concludes with a summary of the findings and a few caveats.

Explanations for Cross-strait Gender-role Attitudinal Differences

Researchers consider cultural and socioeconomic institutions and development to provide the primary explanations for similarities and differences in gender values across time and countries (Inglehart & Norris, 2003; Pampel, 2011). The similarities between Taiwan and China can largely be explained by their shared Confucian tradition, which have been challenged to differing extents by their divergent socioeconomic institutions and developments. A comprehensive appraisal of the distinct changes in gender roles and attitudes toward them in the two societies requires examination of their particular socioeconomic context and trajectories. The following paragraphs consider China and Taiwan in turn.

Data and Measures

The study reported herein used data on Taiwan and China from the 6^th wave of the WVS to examine the differences in gender-role attitudes between the two societies. Both China’s and Taiwan’s research teams conducted the surveys in 2012 based on World Values Survey Executive Committee (WVSEC) sampling rules.⁸ The China 2012 WVS applied the GPS Assisted Area Sampling Method, which incorporates population as a measure of size, stratification, and multi-stage probability proportional to size (PPS), for an effective sample size of 2,300 (in the final report by China’s WVS team). The Taiwan 2012 WVS applied stratified PPS and three-stage random sampling, for an effective sample size of 1,238 (in the final report by Taiwan’s WVS team). In the following analyses of the Taiwanese and Chinese data, weighted samples are used. This section begins by describing the survey questions related to gender equality, and then presents the categorization of gender-role attitudes. A preliminary comparison of Taiwan and China is then made based on the distribution of responses to the gender equality and gender-role attitude measures.

Measuring Gender Equality

Various scales measuring different dimensions of gender-role attitudes have been constructed, allowing us to identify the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of particular attitudes toward women (see McHugh and Frieze, 1997, for a detailed review). The categorization of gender role attitudes is considered the critical measure for comparing the two societies in this paper.

An overview of gender values in Taiwan and China is first provided. In the WVS, five questions directly address gender egalitarianism in the domains of employment, political leadership, university education, business leadership, and women’s role as housewives. Respondents are asked whether they agree or disagree with the following statements⁹:

V45. When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.
V51. On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do.
V52. A university education is more important for a boy than for a girl.
V53. On the whole, men make better business executives than women do.
V54. Being a housewife is just as fulfilling as working for pay.

A higher percentage of respondents in Taiwan than China support gender equality, as measured by the first four questions above and shown in Figure 1. The Taiwanese are also less likely than the mainland Chinese to believe that men should have better employment or university education opportunities or that men make better political leaders or business executives. Given the two countries’ shared cultural heritage, these differences may be due to their different patterns of socioeconomic development. Nevertheless, the extent to which people in Taiwan and China support gender equality varies depending on the specific question asked. The former are well ahead of the latter in supporting gender equality in the domains of politics, higher education, and business management, with 73.9% of Taiwanese respondents disagreeing with the statement that men make better political leaders than women, relative to 47.2% of Chinese respondents. Taiwan’s greater degree of democratization is likely to be the major explanation for this difference. In addition, 87.2% of Taiwanese disagree that a university education is more important for boys than girls, relative to 76% of Chinese, and 73.4% of Taiwanese and 57.9% of Chinese disagree that men make better business executives.

Figure 1.

Percentages Disagreeing with Gender-related Questions in Taiwan and ChinaSource: WVS Taiwan 2012/WVS China 2012

However, the responses to the two other statements constitute a departure from the general pattern of the Taiwanese expressing more progressive attitudes toward gender equality, with little cross-country difference in the percentage of respondents disagreeing that men should be granted more employment opportunities than women. More interestingly, the relative positions of the countries is reversed for V54, with a higher percentage of Chinese respondents disagreeing that being a housewife is fulfilling. These responses raise a number of questions. First, if the two countries have had very different patterns of socioeconomic development, then how can we account for the similarities in their attitudes toward equal employment opportunities for both men and women? Second, how can we explain a modernized society such as Taiwan having such a high percentage of citizens believing that a housewife’s role is just as fulfilling as working for pay? Clearly, the countries’ attitudes towards gender equality are complex, and cannot be summarized by a single measure.

Measuring Gender-role Attitudes

Many consider Taiwan to be less egalitarian than China, which has long embraced a social-collectivist ideology that prioritizes class and gender equality and a high female employment rate (Hsieh & Burgess, 1994; Cornman et al., 2003; Whyte et al., 2003). However, the results from the 2012 WVS survey cited above suggest that Taiwan is generally more egalitarian than China in many respects. If their differing socioeconomic structures can explain their attitudinal differences, then we face yet another puzzle concerning their similar attitudes toward equal employment opportunities for men and women. How can we explain these discrepancies? First, the socioeconomic development gap between the two countries was largest in earlier periods, and has gradually diminished over time. Second, differences in their gender-role attitudes have also fluctuated over time. Accordingly, we need to take generational differences into account in our comparison. In addition, when comparing attitudes toward gender egalitarianism, we cannot ignore the cultural effects working against attitudinal change. The homogeneity in the two societies’ cultures may be a driving force in the convergence of their gender attitudes.

Third, simply comparing equality between the sexes ignores more complicated questions of gender-role divisions and gender relationships. The differences in gender egalitarian attitudes between China and Taiwan are not only a matter of degree but also of kind. Therefore, the focus should be on gender-role attitudes instead of on gender equity. The approved gender roles in any society are primarily the result of interactions between socioeconomic forces and traditional cultural values (Inglehart & Norris, 2003). Clashes between family duties and employment opportunities lead to internal role conflicts for many women, and may explain women’s relatively slow progress toward greater equality in the labor market in many societies (Fortin, 2005).

Two of the WVS questions are of particular interest in discerning the patterns of gender-role attitudes in Taiwan and China. To better understand the two sets of respondents’ attitudes toward the gender-role division, I combined their responses to statements V45 and V54, which concern men’s greater right to a job when the unemployment rate is high and the fulfilling nature of being a housewife, respectively, to generate the four attitudes toward the role of women shown in Table 1. Those who agree with both statements are labeled as supporting a domestic role for women, whereas those who disagree with both are labeled as supporting a working role. The two groups with mixed views, that is, those who disagree that job opportunities should be prioritized for men but view housewife as a fulfilling role for women, and vice versa, are deemed to support a two-track role (either working or staying at home) for women and adopt a men-primary role position, respectively.

Table 1.

Typology of Gender-role Attitudes (V45*V54)

As can be seen in Figure 2, the distribution of role attitudes using this typology is quite different for Taiwan and China, with 42.4% of Taiwanese respondents supporting a two-track role for women, relative to just 31.4% of mainland Chinese. However, more Chinese than Taiwanese support a working role, at 19.5% and 10.9%, respectively. The percentage supporting a traditional domestic role is roughly the same, almost 40% in both societies, whereas 7.7% and 11.4% in Taiwan and China, respectively, take the men-primary stance. In general, then, more mainland Chinese see women’s primary function as firmly in the world of work than their counterparts across the Strait, where the Taiwanese are more inclined to view women as playing a dual role in the worlds of work and home.

Figure 2.

Distribution of Gender-role Attitudes (V45*V54)Source: WVS Taiwan 2012/WVS China 2012

Modeling Gender-role Attitudes

Gender-role attitudinal differences may be explained by either individual social status or collective historical experiences. Inter-cohort transitions and cross-time transformations are regarded as macro-level forces that shape the gender attitudes of the same age group in a collective manner (Shu & Zhu, 2012). The pronounced differences in gender-role attitudes between Taiwan and China are assumed to exhibit a marked generational pattern. However, two levels of difference need to be disentangled. First, different generations possess different gender-role attitudes, which are shaped by their collective historical experiences in their formative years of socialization and their society’s socioeconomic transformations. Hence, the generational effect itself reflects historical and time-variant differences within a single country. Second, the patterns of inter-cohort differences also differ between Taiwan and China. Comparing the same age groups across the societies reveals clear cross-strait inter-cohort differences.¹⁰

As can be seen from Table 2, in general, the youngest generation in both countries is most likely to endorse a two-track role for women, although there is still a large discrepancy between the two countries. In the 30-39 age group, more Taiwanese than Chinese support that role (51.4% vs. 31.1%). The older generation in both countries is more likely to favor a domestic role, although that is particularly true for Taiwan, with roughly half of those aged 40-49 and 60+ approving of that role relative to China, which has a more even distribution across the generations. In China, about one-fifth of the population approves of women having a working role, and that proportion holds roughly constant across the age groups. In Taiwan, in contrast, only about one-tenth of the population approves of such a role for women, and the percentage declines dramatically with age. In every age group, the percentage of Chinese who identify women with a work role is higher than that of Taiwanese, but the biggest gap is between the older cohorts, with 20.8% of Chinese above the age of 60 supporting that role, relative to just 4.5% of their Taiwanese counterparts, an almost fourfold difference.

Table 2.

Gender-role Attitudinal Differences by Age Groups and Nations

To permit analysis of both the cross-strait and cross-generational differences in gender-role attitudes, I merge the two datasets into one, and run a multinomial logit model.¹¹ The dependent variable, gender-role attitude, is classified into three types: domestic role (reference category), working role, and dual-track role. The men-primary role is omitted because there are insufficient cases to generate meaningful comparison. The independent variables are respondent gender, education level, marital status, family status (having children or not), employment status, age group and a country dummy variable. Respondents’ gender and education level are related to their social status, and marital and family status are situational factors generally considered to affect gender-role attitudes. To identify various patterns of gender differences in attitudes, the interaction terms between female and the situational factors of family, marital, and employment status, as well as country, are entered into the model. And to detect cross-national and inter-cohort differences, the main explanatory variable age group is interacted with the country dummy.

The results, presented in Table 3, show gender, education level, marital status, generation, and country to exert an impact on gender-role attitudes, albeit to differing degrees. As expected, more educated respondents prefer the working and two-track roles to the domestic role, and that preference is stronger for women than men. Furthermore, employed women are more likely to prefer the two-track role to the domestic role. The key attitudinal differences between Taiwan and China are that respondents from the latter are more likely to favor a working role for women, whereas their counterparts from the former are more supportive of a two-track role relative to a domestic role. Interacting country with gender shows Chinese women to be more likely to espouse the two-track role relative to the domestic role. Taken together, the two results suggest that Chinese women are less likely to support a domestic role for women than Taiwanese women.

Table 3.

Multinomial Logit Model Analysis, WVS2012 (Merged Sample)

Generation is a critical factor that reflects social transformation and requires further clarification. The results show that the older people are, the more likely they are to agree that women should play a solely domestic rather than dual work and domestic role, which is consistent with modernization theory. However, analyzing the results separately by country and generation informs us only of the rough differences between the countries and generations without specifying which generation accounts for the cross-country differences. The interaction of generation and country allows us to see that a major explanatory factor in those differences is that older Chinese respondents (those over 60) are likelier to espouse a working rather than domestic role for women than their Taiwanese counterparts. They are also more likely to approve of a two-track role. This finding suggests that the older Chinese generation was heavily influenced by its experiences of the collectivist era. The lack of significant attitudinal differences between the younger generations of Taiwanese and Chinese implies that the country’s converging socioeconomic conditions have transformed their gender-role attitudes in a similar direction.

Conclusion

The gap between gender-role attitudes in Taiwan and China has followed a circuitous route. The two societies’ shared Confucian cultural heritage explains the slow-to-change gender division of labor in both, with the majority of women still being assigned domestic duties regardless of whether they work outside the home. As women become increasingly educated and employed, they have to cope with the inevitable role conflicts that arise between home and work life. The traditional idea of women staying at home and men working outside the home has been greatly weakened by the socioeconomic transformations that have taken place in both societies. However, attitudinal change has not followed the simple linear trajectory that modernization theory predicts.

At first glance, having undergone industrialization and economic development earlier than China, Taiwan has also performed comparatively well in terms of gender egalitarian values, which is consistent with the assumptions of modernization theory. Whether it be in the arena of education, politics, or business leadership, a growing majority in both societies, but Taiwan in particular, is unable to accept men’s overwhelming advantages. Nevertheless, the counteracting effect of cultural tradition is more clearly manifested in the persistent gender-role conflicts that women experience between employment and domestic duties. In response to the WVS question concerning equal employment opportunities, about half the respondents in both societies agreed that men should be granted priority when job opportunities are scare. Also, quite a few in both agreed that a housewife’s role is as fulfilling as that of paid work. The responses to these two questions exhibit a lingering Confucian spirit that is resisting change to prescribed gender-roles, although the way that spirit is manifested differs because of the different challenges arising from the countries’ different pace of socioeconomic transformation.

The results turned up a number of cross-country differences. For example, the Chinese are more likely to approve of women working for pay, the Taiwanese are more likely to approve of women adopting a two-track role, and Chinese women are less likely to agree that women should play only a domestic role. The different historical and socioeconomic trajectories of the two societies have also led to generational differences in gender-role attitudes. The general pattern of the Chinese being more accepting than the Taiwanese of women’s working role can be attributed to the very different historical and socioeconomic experiences of the older generations in the two societies. Although those who experienced the collective era in China are now growing old, their gender-role attitudes are no more traditional than those of the younger generations. In Taiwan, in contrast, the older generation has more traditional attitudes than both their mainland Chinese counterparts and the younger generation in their own country.

As the two countries’ socioeconomic development has grown more similar in recent years, the gap in gender-role attitudes between Taiwan and China has narrowed, particularly between the younger generations. However, converging gender-role attitudes do not necessarily mean more progressive attitudes, as indicated by the relatively large numbers of WVS respondents in both societies agreeing that the housewife’s role is a fulfilling one and that men should be afforded priority in times of job scarcity. Although there are differences between China’s post-reform system and Taiwan’s developmental economy, the two countries are moving along the same path of capitalist modernization. Socioeconomic modernization opens up more chances for women to become educated and find jobs, but it does not necessarily lead all women to eschew the role of housewife.

As a final caveat, China is a large and diverse country. Hence, although the findings of this study are true on average, they may not apply to every region. China’s household registration system and the mass migration in recent years from rural to urban areas make regional comparisons difficult. Also, the cross-sectional data used in this study do not allow direct examination of value shifts over time. Future research using time-series data is needed to more comprehensively investigate the gender value changes that have occurred within each country. Despite these limitations, however, this paper makes important contributions to aggregate understanding of the inter-generational differences between and impacts of socioeconomic transformations on gender-role attitudes in Taiwan and China.

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