Gendered Trajectories: Women, Work, and Social Change in Japan and Taiwan (review)

Comparative research on women's employment and family formation patterns in industrialized economies is dominated by a focus on North America and Europe. With some exceptions (e.g., the scholarship by Mary Brinton and colleagues), the comparative employment patterns and work-family issues confronted by East Asian women are largely understudied. Thus, Wei-Hsin Yu's well-crafted comparative study of Japan and Taiwan both enriches the reader with new knowledge of gender inequality in labor markets in these countries, while presenting an interesting empirical puzzle: why do two countries with similar cultural and institutional structures have markedly different levels and forms of gender inequity in paid labor?

As Yu details in her book, Gendered Trajectories: Women, Work, and Social Change in Japan and Taiwan, the many similarities between Japan and Taiwan make the pair of countries ideal for a comparative analysis. For example, the countries share religious and cultural backgrounds shaped by Confucian and Buddhist traditions which, in turn, have shaped similar social values regarding gender. In addition, Japan's 50-year colonial rule of Taiwan during the early 20^th century led to similarities in the countries' bureaucratic governance structures, educational systems and social institutions. Finally, the economies of both countries rapidly developed in the post-World War II period, although Japan's development was earlier (1950s-70s) than Taiwan's (1960s-80s). Despite these great similarities, the employment patterns of women and overall gender inequality were remarkably different by the 1990s, the period of Yu's research.

As Brinton had shown in earlier work, Japanese women's lifecourse employment participation follows a distinct "M" curve, with peaks before marriage and after child-raising responsibilities decrease. In contrast, Yu shows Taiwanese women maintain high levels of employment throughout marital and parenthood transitions. Moreover, Taiwanese women maintain full-time employment after becoming mothers, while Japanese mothers predominately work (after they re-enter) parttime. While Japanese women hold much high educational qualifications, Taiwanese women are more likely to hold senior and managerial positions and experience a smaller gender gap in earnings. Taiwanese women's relative advantage emerged even while the Japanese state passed equal employment protection legislation and guarantees for 14 weeks paid and one-year unpaid maternity leave in the 1980s, yet Taiwanese women were only afforded eight weeks leave in total. Thus, despite having higher qualifications and more legal protections, Japanese women experience less equality in the labor market than Taiwanese women.

Yu embarks on a multi-pronged investigation of this paradox. Her quantitative analyses carefully consider time dimensions, both by cohort and stage of economic development, as well as changes within individual life courses. Yu considers the impact of marriage and children and on women's job exit and subsequent return to the workforce in the two countries. Using qualitative collected in over 80 intensive interviews with working mothers, firm managers, labor union officers, government officials and child care workers, Yu details the workplace practices, challenges faced in negotiating unpaid work at home and government supports, particularly child care, offered to employed mothers. Wedding the insights gleaned from her ethnographic research with the impressively detailed statistical analyses, Yu presents rich detail on the working patterns and work-family challenges Japanese and Taiwanese women face.

Yu's driving explanation is the differential demand for female labor in Japan and Taiwan, resulting from gendered differences in educational attainment, differential industrial concentrations, and the practice of life-long employment by large Japanese firms. First, Taiwan evidences a relative undersupply of skilled male workers, in part a result of the greater gender equity in Taiwanese educational systems wherein males cannot capture the lion's share of prestigious degrees as they do in Japan. This leads employers to recruit and retain highly skilled female workers. In contrast, overall educational attainment for women and men among the Japanese is markedly higher, but the differential investment of Japanese families in the education of sons and daughters leads to under...