Growth with Gender Inequity: Another Look at East Asian Development

Abstract

This brief gendered history of Taiwan’s and Korea’s labor markets indicates a recent reversal in the persistent gender wage gaps that were long sustained by state policies that created and reproduced surplus labor conditions. The relative decline of manufacturing employment since the mid/late 1980s was accompanied by a generalized improvement in women’s relative wages. However, gender wage inequality and women’s low wages continue to be important policy variables, given the concentration of women in lower-paying and less secure occupations and sectors, Korea’s more limited and stalled progress toward gender wage equality, recent signs of downward harmonization of wages in Taiwan’s largest sectors, and ongoing employment discrimination against women. Policies must tackle employment discrimination, improve women’s labor market skills, support women’s caring work in the home to ensure their equitable pursuit of employment, and create gender equitable old-age security systems.