Women's Working Lives in East Asia (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women's Working Lives in East Asia Glenda S. Roberts (bio) Women's Working Lives in East Asia. Edited by BrintonMary C.. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2001. xv, 378 pages. $60.00, cloth; $24.95, paper. This is a border-crossing, edited volume that queries the socioeconomic and cultural factors surrounding women's working lives in three economies of East Asia. Brinton's introduction argues the worthiness of the comparison: Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea share a common Confucian background that has fostered patriarchal gender systems, though kinship systems differ among the three societies. Japan industrialized first and has much more economic clout than the other two countries, to be sure, but Taiwan and South Korea industrialized in a similar time frame and have often been compared in terms of economic development. All three countries are democracies, and all, in recent years, have put in place some legislation backing equal opportunity for men and women in the workplace. Chapter two, by Brinton, Yean-Ju Lee, and William Parish, lays out the similar initial conditions with different outcomes for married women workers in South Korea and Taiwan. These two countries, argue the authors, offered us semicontrolled "natural experiments" for what happens to women and employment in industrializing economies. They have ended up different in terms of married women's patterns of employment, returns on human capital investment, and wage gaps vis-à-vis men. In the 1970s, both South Korean and Taiwanese women tended to delay marriage in order to work and to exit the workforce upon marriage. But by the late 1980s, the tendency of Taiwanese women to quit at marriage had eased, while Korean women, in contrast, tend more to quit at marriage and, if working when married, tend not to be in formal employment, unlike women in Taiwan. Moreover, in Taiwan, with increased education came a trend for women to be formally employed. In Korea, in contrast, an increase in education lessened the probability of employment. Furthermore, high levels of human capital for Korean women did not lead to higher probabilities of employment for them, in contrast to Taiwanese women. Utilizing a variety of frameworks to explain these phenomena, the authors tease out the social strands that have led to such different outcomes. In chapter three, Wei-hsin Yu compares the employment of married women in Japan and Taiwan. As attitudes toward the gendered household division of labor are similar in the two countries, why is the labor-force participation rate for married women with young children so much higher in Taiwan than in Japan? Through interviews with married working women [End Page 150] in the two societies, Yu finds that financial resources and domestic work are the most likely determinants of women's decisions about whether to continue employment upon marriage or childrearing. In Taiwan, where there is a labor shortage, married women's earnings relative to men's are higher than in Japan, so women's earning potential relative to men's is higher. In Japan, constraints on married women's participation include heavy overtime demands, job rotation expectations for career employees, long urban commutes, a shortage of government daycare in urban areas, and insufficient hours in those daycare centers that do exist. Statistics on who is caring for children in what arrangements, as well as discussion of current Japanese governmental policies aimed at boosting childcare provision, would have been welcome. Yean-Ju Lee and Shuichi Hirata do a quantitative analysis of "Women, Work and Marriage in Three East Asian Labor Markets" in chapter four. They ask whether job separation at the time of first marriage is the outcome of women's cost-benefit analysis of their use of time or the result of structural constraints posed by the labor markets in the three countries. Structural characteristics in the labor markets of the three countries that affect women quitting their jobs at marriage are average firm size, the size of the public sector, and the gender wage gap. Taiwan has a predominance of small firms and a large government sector, so the disadvantages for women are fewer. In Japan, the authors found many organizational barriers to women's continued employment, such as the culture of...