Do the Small Firms Give Advantages to Female Employees? : Firm Size Effects on Taiwanese Women's Career Choice

This study examines whether the difference of firm size influences job career of female in Taiwan using the Panel Study of Family Dynamics (PSFD) data. Previous studies show that majority of Taiwanese women continue their job without a long career break by marriage or childbirth. Well-known explanation for this is that the industrial structure composed of large number of small-and-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and family business provide women with flexible working conditions. However, existing studies testing firm size effects on a woman’s career, have failed to reach a consistent result. To eliminate possible problems providing the inconsistencies, this study limit the objects of analysis to female employees with regular salary, excluding self-employed workers and workers of family business without payment. Also, previous studies usually treat job change and job turn over separately, but in this study those two actions are simultaneously analyzed in a discrete-time multinomial logit model.

 This study tests mainly two hypotheses: female workers in small sized firm are able to (1) enjoy flexible working conditions by negotiating with their employees and (2) accumulate better skills which are useful for a labor market than their counterparts in large firms are. Dependent variable is employment choice, which have 4 categories; “continue the same job”, “change job in SMEs firm”, “change job in large firm” and “leave from working”. Main independent variable is a dummy variable indicating working experience in SMEs and interaction terms SMEs dummy and two event dummies standing for marriage and childbirth. The result indicates that women who have working experiences in SMEs are more likely to have uninterrupted working careers than those who have experiences in large-sized firms.