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More men choosing foreign spouses

The Ministry of the Interior's latest population survey suggests that while more men are getting married, women are increasingly staying single. The increasing number of foreign spouses who marry Taiwanese men seems to explain the disparity, the China Times reported.

The ministry's data shows that the number of Taiwanese choosing foreign spouses had increased annually since 1987 until peaking in 2003 at 31.85 percent of all marriages. By the end of last year, the number of foreign spouses in Taiwan had increased to 365,000 individuals, while the percentage of unmarried Taiwanese men fell from 39.04 percent to 37.55 percent.

The percentage of single women, however, increased from 29.80 to 31.18 percent.

Vice Minister of the Interior Chien Tai-lang ( 簡太郎 ) told the China Times on Saturday that the rate at which Taiwanese men are marrying foreign women is one of the main reasons why the rate of marriage among Taiwanese women has fallen.

Chien added that societal paradigms have shifted in the wake of rapid economic development in Taiwan. The education level for women has increased along with the number of women with jobs. For today's economically independent Taiwanese women, marriage is no longer the only route to economic stability, he said.

Because of traditional attitudes favoring men over women and the pressures of passing on the family name to the next generation, more Taiwanese men have chosen to look abroad when looking for a mate, Chien said.

Of the 392,705 foreign spouses in Taiwan as of the end of June, 93.4 percent were female. Of those, most are southeast asian or chinese.

However, Chien also said that the percentage of marriages to foreign spouses had fallen since 2003.
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