Analysis: Taiwan's Gender Income Gap Lowest in Three Years but Still Huge

TaiwanPlus News

The latest government figures on Taiwan’s gender income gap show men earned 1.57 times as much as women in 2023, down from 1.6 times the year before. TaiwanPlus spoke to the secretary-general of the Awakening Foundation, Chyn Yu-rung, to find out what this means.

Transcript

00:00so the ministry of finances latest statistics show that the income gap between men and women

00:06in 2023 reached its smallest gap in three years but it's still a huge gap what can we take away

00:14from these numbers we can still see a very huge gap exist and though the government says that the

00:22this is the lowest in three years but we have to emphasize that three years ago that was when

00:30covid-19 hit taiwan and from what we observe women's jobs are greatly affected by the epidemic

00:39during that time so we we can anticipate the gender wage gap will be very large back in that era so

00:48uh this in 2025 there comes the lowest gender wage gap that we think it's normal and it's natural

00:57happened and it is not affected by uh national policy so uh we think it is still a very huge gap that

01:06should be taken care of and why is there still such a huge gap why is it that a man earns so much more

01:13than a woman still in taiwan there are a lot of reasons for example uh men are relatively uh have

01:21more opportunities to get promoted and uh uh once a woman get married or if she has child then uh her

01:31income would be will be affected that still happens in taiwan if we compare uh women with children and

01:40women without children the uh the income of women with children are averagely lower than women without

01:48children so uh that's one of the reasons and uh also when there are uh you can say there are separations

01:58between professionals for example uh in taiwan uh if you work as an engineer in semiconductor industry

02:07then you have a much more high higher pay than uh other workers that work in service industries and

02:17there is um a lot of men uh concentrate in the semiconductor industry but women are mainly working

02:25service industry and given this given this persistent gap what would it take for a man and a woman to earn

02:32the same do you see this happening in your lifetime maybe not in my lifetime from what we know uh the

02:40government policy is very important they they have a very important uh role in uh in shortening the the

02:48gender wage gap uh for example several european countries are uh performed uh much worse than taiwan

02:5810 years ago but they are performing uh better than taiwan now because they have their policies uh but

03:05taiwan still do not have a national level policy to counter the gender wage gap so we think it is uh

03:13you can say it is a huge problem if you want to achieve gender equality in taiwan

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