Gender Differences in Becoming Self-Employed in Taiwan and Korea

Fengbin Chang, University of Chicago

Self-employment has been an active phenomenon in the western and eastern societies. With the flexible time schedule and independent decision making, many people might prefer to be self-employed rather than work for other people in the conventional job market. Some scholars argue that people with special skills are more likely to become self-employed (McClelland 1961). Other scholars from the structural perspective argue that self-employment is a response to the economic and political conditions that defined the overall opportunity structure (Aronson 1991). Piore and Sable (1984) further argue that the shift from mass production to “flexible specialization” promotes the growth of self-employment. However, among these debates, gender difference in self-employment has not received enough academic attention. As more and more women enter labor market, traditional models might not be able to explain the variance of women's career choice. For example, there are substantial gender differences in the reasons why individuals become self-employed. Women with young children are more likely than men to cite flexibility of schedule and family-related reasons for becoming self-employed. For men, the reasons for becoming self-employed show little association with their parental status (Boden 1999). Since self-employment also plays an important role in East Asian societies such as Taiwan and Korea, this comparative study provides an opportunity of natural experiment to examine that, to what extent, either individualistic or structural hypotheses of self-employment can be generalized in non-western societies. Using the life course approach, this study argues that the differences in the labor market structure and marriage bar significantly influence men and women’s chance of entering self-employment in Taiwan and Korea. The research data is based on two data sets with the same questionnaires: (1)" Investigation on Korean Social Change, " conducted by the Institute for Social Development Studies, Yonsei University, and supported by NORC and Korea Research Foundation. The data, collected in December of 1996, contains demographic information, characteristics of employment, and retrospective job histories of 3,570 individual selected from the 22 stratified clusters covering the whole country except Cheju Island. The sample is restricted to people between age 25 and 60. (2) The "Social Change Survey in Taiwan" , conducted by the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica in 1996. It includes island-wide samples of 1,452 men and 1,379 women between 25 and 60 years old. Both sets of data provide rich information for analyzing individuals' job mobility and career paths. By using event history analysis to model the process by which individuals move into and out of episodes of self-employment, this study provides a crucial information to test the research hypotheses. After examining the interactions between gender and different social, political, and economic contexts, we found that the marriage bar is lower in Taiwan than in Korea. Today Taiwanese women tend to have a better chance to maintain the formal employment after getting married. For Korean married women, facing a less flexible labor market, becoming self-employed is an attractive option for them to maintain work and family responsibility.