Women spend an average of three times more time doing routine household chores than their male partners do, and are spending more time doing so, a recent study by the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) found.
Last year, females aged 15 to 64 spent an average of 4.41 hours doing uncompensated household work, compared with an average of 3.81 hours per day in 2016, the study found.
Some females surveyed by the ministry do as much as 3.18 hours more housework per day than the average woman in the nation, it showed.
Meanwhile, males living in the same household as the females surveyed did an average of 1.48 hours per day of housework, it found.
The uncompensated work done by women included regular housework (laundry, cooking, cleaning, etc), and caring for underage children and elderly family members, it showed.
On regular housework alone, the average woman spent an average of 2.22 hours per day last year, compared with the 0.73 hours their partners spent on it, the study found.
Chen Jau-hwa (陳瑤華), a professor at Soochow University who studies human rights, said that women are doing more at home than men, despite the modern conveniences brought by improvements in technology.
It is a “structural problem,” Chen said.
“The prevailing attitude in Taiwanese society is still that women should do housework,” she said.
Even though the government had tried to reduce the burden of daycare and elderly care on families through policies and programs, female employees of daycare center and nursing homes outnumber their male counterparts ninefold, the professor said.
“This means that what was considered ‘women’s work’ in the home is now offloaded to women elsewhere,” she said.
The situation represents a serious structural imbalance that would require a change in the overall mindset of society to overcome, she said.
“When men are willing to put more time into housework and watching children, it improves the quality of their marriages,” said Ho Pi-chen (何碧珍), executive director of ECPAT Taiwan, which is part of the worldwide ECPAT network of organizations working to end the sexual exploitation of children
Women would also be more willing to marry if the social tendency was for men to invest more energy into household duties, Ho said.
One woman surnamed Chang (張) said that due to her husband’s work schedule, she took care of all of the household duties, even though she also had a job, which meant she had to sleep less to get the housework done.
She said she hoped her husband would at least take care of his own things, which would reduce the burden on her.
Taipei, New Taipei City, Keelung and Taoyuan would issue a decision at 8pm on whether to cancel work and school tomorrow due to forecasted heavy rain, Keelung Mayor Hsieh Kuo-liang (謝國樑) said today. Hsieh told reporters that absent some pressing reason, the four northern cities would announce the decision jointly at 8pm. Keelung is expected to receive between 300mm and 490mm of rain in the period from 2pm today through 2pm tomorrow, Central Weather Administration data showed. Keelung City Government regulations stipulate that school and work can be canceled if rain totals in mountainous or low-elevation areas are forecast to exceed 350mm in
EVA Airways president Sun Chia-ming (孫嘉明) and other senior executives yesterday bowed in apology over the death of a flight attendant, saying the company has begun improving its health-reporting, review and work coordination mechanisms. “We promise to handle this matter with the utmost responsibility to ensure safer and healthier working conditions for all EVA Air employees,” Sun said. The flight attendant, a woman surnamed Sun (孫), died on Friday last week of undisclosed causes shortly after returning from a work assignment in Milan, Italy, the airline said. Chinese-language media reported that the woman fell ill working on a Taipei-to-Milan flight on Sept. 22
COUNTERMEASURE: Taiwan was to implement controls for 47 tech products bound for South Africa after the latter downgraded and renamed Taipei’s ‘de facto’ offices The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is still reviewing a new agreement proposed by the South African government last month to regulate the status of reciprocal representative offices, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said yesterday. Asked about the latest developments in a year-long controversy over Taiwan’s de facto representative office in South Africa, Lin during a legislative session said that the ministry was consulting with legal experts on the proposed new agreement. While the new proposal offers Taiwan greater flexibility, the ministry does not find it acceptable, Lin said without elaborating. The ministry is still open to resuming retaliatory measures against South
1.4nm WAFERS: While TSMC is gearing up to expand its overseas production, it would also continue to invest in Taiwan, company chairman and CEO C.C. Wei said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) has applied for permission to construct a new plant in the Central Taiwan Science Park (中部科學園區), which it would use for the production of new high-speed wafers, the National Science and Technology Council said yesterday. The council, which supervises three major science parks in Taiwan, confirmed that the Central Taiwan Science Park Bureau had received an application on Friday from TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, to commence work on the new A14 fab. A14 technology, a 1.4 nanometer (nm) process, is designed to drive artificial intelligence transformation by enabling faster computing and greater power
RSS