Working Mothers in Taiwan

• In Event: Parenthood, Marriage, and Participation

Abstract

I propose to examine how working mothers in Taiwan make decisions to create work-family balance given their employment situation, the government’s support, and family circumstances. Taiwan serves as an interesting hybrid case study because its welfare policies are similar to that of social democracies in Europe (e.g., Taiwan has universal healthcare and its childcare policies are moving in this direction), but its work environment is more akin to liberal democracies like the US (in fact, the work environment is more extreme than the US).

Between August 2023 to January 2024, I conducted long-form interviews with 25 working mothers in Taiwan as a US Fulbright Senior scholar. The mothers were generally of the same cohort with at least one child under 10 and of a middle-class background. They were also a diverse group with single moms, lesbian moms, white and blue-collar workers, and urban and rural to capture multiple perspectives under this hybrid regime. I also mapped out the development of government support, in the form of birth bonuses, care subsidies, and parental leave, over the past 25 years.

This paper will outline the strides the Taiwanese government has made in supporting working mothers and underscore its motivation to do so because of the country’s extremely low fertility rate. It also takes notice of cultural practices that support mothers including that of the “sitting confinement” where a mother performs no household or care duties for the first thirty or forty days after giving birth and that of extended family support for care. However, it will also outline that concomitant changes have not been made in the workplace and the support of extended families appears to wane as nuclear families are on the rise—with women giving birth later, the older generation is less able to provide care. This paper will grapple with the question of whether Taiwan’s hybrid approach of a liberal work environment and social democratic welfare regime is truly the best of both worlds or whether it falls short by failing to pursue one path fully. This paper will form a chapter of a book project that also looks at US and Spanish working mothers.

Author

• Grace C. Huang, St. Lawrence University