Social Change, Social Policy and Women’s Life Course in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Hui-Chun Ma, 馬慧君
• Other Authors: none
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/89999361469413107398

博士 === 國立中正大學 === 社會福利所 === 95 === A series of significant changes occurred in social and economic structure in Taiwan changed women’s traditional standard life course. Women with different generation are different in education, marriage and fertility, family types, and job participation. Women’s chances to education are almost the same with men’s, the education degree of women is improving. The improvement of women’s free will delayed women’s schedule of marriage and fertility and also changed the family types in Taiwan. The gender division is changing because of women’s labor market participation. Usually, men have little responsibility to family care, but women take both the care responsibility and the economic role to her family. How to get balance between work and family becomes more important when participation of labor market become an inevitable trend in women’s life course. Women’s problems are public problems. Social changes broaden the gap between “private problems” and “institution’s ability to solve problems”. After reviewing policies of care and work in Taiwan, we find that policies of care are scrappy, and policies of work are limited and un-supportive for women. The new emerging demands highlight the insufficiencies of contemporary policies. Because of overlapping between “time to work” and “time to care”, both men and women have to get balance between work and family. How to make a policy be a friendly policy both to men and women becomes more important now. We need the flexibility to choose, whether we work or care. How to get the flexibility and balance between work and family is a new challenge for us. Life course researches are helpful to “timing of policy intervention”because of “time consciousness”. Life course researches can be tools to reform contemporary social welfare policies and confront these new challenges. We also hope that pursuing balance between work and family will be helpful to gender equality.