How do Gendered Laws Affect Women’s Decisions among Education, Family and Career? The Case of Taiwan

Abstract

Abstract This paper studies how women’s life decisions were affected by the passage of the Act of Gender Equality in Employment, legislation concerning workplace gender equality in Taiwan. Using a difference-in-differences estimation, we first showed that the act increased women’s education relative to men. We then separated women by their college education into the treatment and control groups in a bivariate probit model, considering their education decisions to be related with women’s other life decisions. Empirical results show that the effects of the act are conditional on college degree. The act increased the likelihood of women with a college degree to marry earlier, have children and start a job earlier. But the act increased the labor force participation of the women without a college degree more than the women with one. Our interpretation of the results is that the act enhanced the family prospects of the college-educated women and promoted the career prospects for the women without college degrees. JEL classification: J16, K38