This paper examines gender differences in gender-role attitudes from a
perspective in which social and economic changes are assumed to be the main force
changing family life, employment life and individual beliefs. In doing so, this paper
uses a comparative framework to assess the extent how family- and individual-level
attributes respectively explain women’s and men’s gender-role attitudes in China and
Taiwan -- the societies with the same Chinese cultural heritage but different political
and economic systems. The particular attention is put on the relationship between
employment life and gender-role attitudes.
Using primary survey data from East Asia Social Survey, this study takes
married population as an example to test the following hypotheses. First, women’s
perception of gender roles is less traditional than men’s. Second, in response to the
different patterns (paths) of social and economic change, people in Taiwan hold more
egalitarian in gender role attitudes than those in China. Finally, the factors
explaining the variation of gender role attitudes across gender and societies would be
different. Controlling for other socio-economic and demographic factors, the effect
of employment life on gender role attitudes would be more significant for women
than for men and more crucial for Taiwan than for China. The preliminary analysis
fully supports the first hypothesis and partially supports the rest of the hypotheses.