Taiwan gender pay gap indicates 59 extra workdays for women

Taipei, Feb. 26 (CNA) Women in Taiwan must work an average of 59 additional days in 2025 to earn the same annual salary as men, one day more than in 2024, according to data released Thursday by the Ministry of Labor.

Taiwan's gender pay gap last year stood at 16.1 percent, meaning women earned 83.9 percent of men's average hourly wages, the ministry said in a statement.

Based on preliminary results from a wage survey conducted by the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, women earned an average hourly wage of NT$340 (US$10.89) last year, compared with NT$405 for men.

The wage gap translates into women needing to work 59 more days than men to match annual earnings, placing Taiwan's Equal Pay Day on Feb. 28 this year, or the 59th day of the calendar year, the ministry said.

The gender pay gap widened by 0.3 percentage points from 2024 and by 0.5 percentage points compared with 2019, Jasmine Mei (梅家瑗), head of the ministry's Department of Statistics, told CNA.

One such sector is electronic components manufacturing, where men earned an average hourly wage of NT$727 last year, compared with NT$417 for women, resulting in a gender pay gap of 42.7 percent.

According to the ministry, this disparity has widened in recent years, likely due to gender distribution across different job roles, with men more heavily represented in higher-paying research and engineering positions.

When electronic components manufacturing is excluded, the gender pay gap across other industrial and service sectors narrows to 11.3 percent, down 0.3 percentage points from the previous year and 1.5 percentage points from 2019, the ministry said.

The healthcare sector also recorded a relatively large gender pay gap of 43.1 percent last year, although the figure declined compared with both 2024 and 2019.

The ministry noted that Taiwan's gender pay gap in recent years has remained 13 to 16.5 percentage points lower than those reported in Japan and South Korea.

When compared to the United States using median annual salary data for full-time workers, Taiwan's gap of 16.2 percent in 2024 was also lower than the 17.3 percent reported in the U.S., the ministry said.