Chin-fen Chang

Chin-fen Chang is a full-time Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology of Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

Currently she is working a book on The Sociology of Labor Markets, to be published in Chinese, addressed to a Chinese audience. As part of the book, but also for separate article publication, she works on another two specific empirical projects at Stanford, both of which are comparative analyses among East Asian Countries (mainly Japan, Korea, and Taiwan).

Even though employed women are still overrepresented in poorly-paid, low-status jobs, the gender wage gap has narrowed over the past two decades in most countries. A similar trend occurred in the East Asian region too. However, it remains unknown whether the smaller gender wage gap is a result of better endowments of women (more education and work experience, factors emphasized by human capital theory) or of more comparable returns for women's qualifications (supporting institutional perspectives and/or contributions of women's movements in reducing discrimination). This project utilizes the decomposition method to solve the puzzle.

The second project aims to compare differences of social identities among East Asian countries. In addition to the class perspective as being conventionally used in the past literature, this paper will compare gender differences of the status evaluation from a feminist perspective.

One of her recent publications in English is: "The employment discontinuity of married women in Taiwan: Job status, ethnic background and motherhood ethnic background and motherhood," Current Sociology, 54(2): 209-228. Her website in IOS is: http://www.ios.sinica.edu.tw/ios/index.php?pid=23&id=115

Chang got her Ph.D. in Sociology from The Ohio State University (1989), M.A. in Sociology from the University of Iowa (1986), and B.A. in Economics from National Taiwan University (1980). She served as the chief editor of Taiwanese Journal of Sociology from the year of 2004 to 2006.