More women participating in the work force

The CEPD also noted that since the total number of jobs had not increased significantly, this growth in women entering the labor market has been at the expense of the men's labor force participation rate, which fell from 68.2 percent to 67.0 percent over the same period.

While women lag behind men in terms of paid employment around the world, Taiwan's women also still lag behind their sisters in most other advanced economies. In many European and North American countries, for example, more than 70 percent of women participate in the workforce, and even in Japan and South Korea, which are typically characterized as having large gender gaps, the figures are 67 percent and 59 percent, respectively.

This is not simply an equal-opportunities issue of concern to feminists and liberal-minded organizations. It concerns Taiwan's competitiveness on the global stage. Having spent decades improving young women's access to educational resources, it is Taiwan's loss if the country does not make the most of their resulting talents.

Indeed, the current situation can be seen within an historical context stretching back thousands of years to China's golden age of philosophy, now known as the Contention of a Hundred Schools of Thought. While this is generally understood as the period in which philosophers such as Confucius, Zhuangzi and Hanfeizi brought forth new ideas that later became codified as Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism and so forth, the real consequences were social and political rather than philosophical. Particularly important was the ideal of a meritocracy promoted by Confucius and Mozi, who argued that people should be employed according to their talents rather than according to their status at birth. Of course, the 'people' in this meritocracy meant 'men,' and it wasn't until the 20th century that women in Taiwan and China were given any significant role outside traditional areas of home and field.

That a meritocratic system was adopted had nothing to do with concepts of fairness, egalitarianism or human rights, but was simply a result of pragmatic requirements, a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest applied to systems of government. By Confucius' birth some 26 centuries ago, China had split into a number of small states, which battled with each other for survival and supremacy, and for the right to reunite and rule “all under heaven.” In their pursuit of this goal, some states were willing to consider new political and military strategies, including the employment of talented members of the lower social orders. These were the states which prospered.

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