| dc.description.abstract | This research is aimed at investigating the impact of marriage on women’s earnings. To conduct this study I have used the “Manpower Utilization Survey Data” from 1978 to 2011 collected by Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan, ROC. In the first part of this research, I collated the relevant data to see how marital status, personal characteristics and family variables can affect a woman’s income. The study has found that years of education, experience in the workforce and living in an urbanized area can all have a positive influence on a woman’s wage. In addition, this study also confirmed that married women were affected by both their husband’s income and the age of their children, i.e., married women in our sample were found to earn more when their children were under the age of six years, though those with children between the ages of seven to eighteen showed to earn less. In the second part of this research, I retained all the personal characteristics of married women, and substituted them into the estimation formula of unmarried women. This study found that married Taiwanese women received less income than their unmarried counterparts, and this also referred to as the “wage penalty.” As such, this study moved a step further by collecting relevant macroeconomic or relevant social variables in order to explain possible factors that actually resulted in wage penalty on married women in Taiwan. Our study shows that unemployment rates and the first marriage age of women all have a positive influence on the penalty effect, but GDP in service industry and the proportion of female workers employed by government all have a negative influence on the penalty effect. It is my hope that this research will shed some light as to the relationship between these macroeconomic factors and the marriage penalty on women. Subsequent policies could be drawn so as to improve equality within the workplace. | en_US |