About 4.3 percent of women aged 15 to 64, or 366,000 people, live alone, up from 2.9 percent in 2015 and 2.6 percent in 2011, a Ministry of Health and Welfare study found.
Divorced or separated women accounted for the highest percentage — 17.3 percent of divorcees and separated women live alone, while 11.6 percent of widows do, the data released on Thursday showed.
According to a 2017 survey, there are about 3.8 percent more women living alone who are 65 or older than the percentage of men in the same age group.
Women 35 or younger are more likely than those in other age groups to live alone or with friends, classmates or coworkers as opposed to with family, the Social and Family Affairs Administration said.
Women aged 35 to 44 are most likely to live with family at 96.1 percent, but the figure drops again as age increases, as 6.6 percent of those aged 55 to 64 live alone, it said.
Commenting on the data, Wu Wei-ting (伍維婷), assistant professor at the Shih Hsin University Graduate Institute for Gender Studies, said other than women having a slightly longer life expectancy, the increase in the percentage of women living alone could also be attributed to the higher divorce rate, which has hovered around 2.3 couples per 1,000 people over the past few years.
Of these divorcees, 60 percent are women 44 or older who decide to divorce after their children entered junior-high or high school, she said.
Considering only about half as many women as men choose to remarry, the number of women living alone is bound to increase, she added.
The phenomenon could also be attributable to the increasing tendency for women to not marry at all, Wu said.
As of the end of the last year, the percentage of unmarried women aged 40 to 64 was 13 percent, Ministry of the Interior data showed.
In a society that still has not achieved gender equality, women receive less benefit from being married than men, Wu said, adding that even a working wife spends three times as long on housework as her husband.
As the government considers how to provide long-term care for an aging population, it should take into account the gender discrepancy among those who live alone, Wu said.
“As the government creates long-term care facilities, it can expect that more women than men will be living alone,” she said. “Certain infrastructure in elderly daycare centers and apartments should be adjusted, such as the number of public toilets, while women also tend to care more about privacy than men.”
Although more women are living alone, they are more likely than men to seek social connection, Academia Sinica Institute of Sociology assistant researcher Alice Cheng (鄭雁馨) said.
Increasing numbers of men are also choosing not to marry, which could soon lead to unmarried people constituting one-quarter of the entire eligible population, Cheng said, urging the government to think of ways to support people who are single and live alone.
A 45-year-old woman who plans not to marry or find a partner said that she would prefer to live a carefree life and plans to find other single women to live with in her old age, Cheng said.
However, she said that she worries most about being unable to find someone to serve as her medical power of attorney and her companions dying before her, leaving her to die alone, Cheng added.
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