In less than fifty years, Taiwan has risen from obscurity as a Japanese colony to become the world’s 14th largest trading country, a feat some observers have called a "Taiwan miracle." It is our contention that much of Taiwan’s economy was built with the labor of women: women working for their husbands’ companies, women working in factories, as well as women opening their own companies. Yet the collective contributions of these women to Taiwan’s economic growth are often unrecognized and under-studied.

This panel draws attention to women’s work through examination of the following cases: (1) a sociological study comparing the roles of bosses’ wives’ in enterprises in different industries; (2) an anthropological study comparing the life experiences of different generations of textile workers; (3) an anthropological study of female entrepreneurs who go against the grain of patriarchal family logic by opening up their own businesses without male involvement; and (4) a comparative sociological study of married women’s roles in the Taiwanese and Japanese economies. In each case, the authors transcend unidimensional models of gender and power by looking at how different variables (e.g. occupation, age, marital status, or place in a broader political economy) influence women’s participation in the economy. This panel, by taking a gendered perspective on the Taiwanese economy, will contribute to a greater understanding of Taiwan itself as well as the broader dynamics of gender and social development.

Yu-hsia Lu, Academia Sinica

This study explores the organizational determinants of bosses’ wives’ involvement in Taiwanese small family businesses. Based on in-depth interviews with fifty-four small family firms and a sampling survey of 305 family firms across industries, the study analyzed the bosses’ wives’ roles in both the family and business system in terms of the interaction between family organization and business organization.

The findings indicate that characteristics of family business organization including job skills, the level of diversification and the composition of family organization have significant effects on wives’ involvement in the family business. In the industries featured with female techniques, wives’ involvement in both labor division and decision-making are significantly higher than in other industries. As compared with the industries featured with female techniques, those wives in the industries featured with male techniques may be less likely to get autonomy on the process of production and management. However, wives’ involvement is not significantly correlated with the density of female labor in the particular industry. Besides the characteristics of the business organization, the findings indicate a significant effect of family composition; due to other family members’ involvement, (especially bosses’ brothers), those bosses’ wives in extended families are less likely to participate or get autonomy in the business organization than those in nuclear families.

These results suggest that the degree of diversification and familistic orientation of business organizations contribute significantly to bosses’ wives’ involvement and empowerment in Taiwanese small family businesses.

Anru Lee, California State University, Sacramento

This paper focuses on the meaning of work to three generations of women who came of age after Taiwan’s export-oriented industrialization and who are currently working in the textile industry. The life stories of three women are chosen to highlight the socio-economic circumstances and cultural environments each member of these generations face. Social scientists normally compare the lives of successive generations (i.e., mothers and daughters) who are twenty years apart. However, given the rapid economic change Taiwan has experienced since the 1960s, I adopted industrial generations instead of kinship generations for analysis, which are generally ten or even fewer years apart. Taiwanese women joining the wage labor market ten years apart have very different work experiences. The life stories in this paper are thus manifestations of the evolving global system as lived by Taiwanese women, and each of the stories is closely related to one another, for the development of a later stage of the evolving system is built upon the previous one.

Scott Simon, Academia Sinica

In the past forty years, the growth of Taiwan’s SME (small and medium enterprise) sector has provided opportunities for individuals and families who prefer entrepreneurship to working for others. In a capitalist economy that encourages small-scale business, both women and men have been able to seek economic autonomy through private business. For men, the decision to go into business fits well into the dominant patriarchal logic of Taiwanese society which claims "men manage outside affairs, women manage inside affairs." Women, however, must not only overcome the usual obstacles to opening a business. They must challenge their roles in the patriarchal family system and find new places within it.

Based on in-depth interviews and life history analysis, this paper examines the experiences of several autonomous female entrepreneurs in Taipei. These women often take a strongly critical view of the patriarchal family system and use entrepreneurship as a way of establishing greater financial and social independence in contemporary Taiwan. This paper focuses on their relations to their natal families, how they invent new identities as entrepreneurs within those families, and the social factors that can make family dynamics either an aid or a hindrance to female entrepreneurship.

Wei-hsin Yu, National University of Singapore