Changing Trends 2:
Women in the knowledge economy
As men and women shift roles, another force in the "gender-neutralization" of work comes from the economy.
According to American management expert Peter Drucker, knowledge work has already superseded the boundaries of gender. The British magazine The Economist reported the best evidence to support this statement: in the United States, there are 140 female college students for every 100 male students; in Sweden, the ratio is 150 to 100. According to data from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, in 2001 there were 612,000 female students in post-secondary schools in Taiwan, or 50.5% of the total number of students.
As higher education provides opportunities for women, they have moved from a quantitative change in increasing employment rates for women to a qualitative change where women serve as business leaders, redrawing the world's economic map. According to The Economist, in the emerging economies of East Asia the ratio of female to male workers is 100 to 83, which exceeds that found in the club of wealthy nations in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In developed countries, half of all economic power is contributed by women, and gradually women have taken over as the main force in household earnings.
In the past ten years, Taiwanese women's labor participation rate has grown from a marginal three tenths to a record high of 48.68% last year. Their income has increased by 170%, while men's incomes have increased by 140%.
As women move from traditional roles as wife and mother into the workplace, they break through the first set of challenges. As they move into middle management and have a first taste of power, they face a second set of challenges. Moreover, if they want to enter the top levels of leadership and shoulder the responsibilities for their organizations' successes and failures, they have to break through the glass ceiling--a difficult task. Cases of women entrepreneurs who work entirely independently from men, such as Jance Lu, founder of memory module manufacturer Power Quotient International, are very rare. Among Taiwan's 1,219 listed companies, companies with a female founder make up fewer than 1%.
Over time, it is becoming clear that women are using their position to break up men's monopolies in the business world. Nowadays, it seems every industry has its stories of women who refuse to be bested by men.
In the male-dominated Bureau of Investigation, Kaohsiung office director Wu Lih-jen is the first high-ranking woman on her team. In the 1970s, when hardly any women worked for the bureau, after Wu completed training she was assigned to an office in Taoyuan where no women had been working. The first day she went to work on an investigation, a suspect said to her face, "Isn't anyone on duty here? Go fetch a man!"
Wu, however, wanted no special treatment, and made herself a "genderless" person. No matter what kind of person she encountered, from gangsters with tattoos all over their bodies to drug dealers who lost control of their bodily functions during interrogation, she dealt with them as a professional.
In the super-masculine ranks of the ROC Army, Colonel Ting Liang-chen, Political Warfare Director for Airborne Cavalry Brigade 601, overcame women's limitations of physical strength. In her basic training, she worked alongside male officers, patrolling the camp at night and serving as duty officer. She was even brave enough to undergo parachute training, enjoying no special privileges as a woman. After 28 years in the military, on January 1, 2007, she became the first high-ranking female officer in a first-line combat unit in the ROC Army.