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This article discusses the formation of gender equity education policies in Taiwan between 1995 and 1999. The first part of the article presents a general description of Taiwan's women's movement, the education reform movement, and the development of women's/gender studies after the lifting of martial law in 1987. The second part of the article focuses on a discussion of the process of formation of two important policies: the announcement of gender equality education as a part of the education reform agenda by the Education Reform Council, Executive Yuan in 1996; and the inclusion of gender issues as an integral aspect of the elementary and secondary school curriculum reform from 1997 to 1999. The social, political, economic, and educational contexts within which these two policies emerged and the critical factors affecting their formation are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of massification of higher education and the quest for competitiveness, the Taiwanese government has adopted a series of higher education reforms since the late 1990s. While the low birthrate has become a potential threat, recent developments in higher education policies such as the Program for Developing First-Class Universities and Top Research Centers, the Incentives for Teaching Excellences, and the new Multiple Examination Program have had considerable effects on students of different gender and socioeconomic classes. Even though the expansion in higher education has enabled many students to enter universities, inequality remains, as students from different socioeconomic backgrounds are distributed to different types/ranks of universities. Students from the lower socioeconomic class are mostly concentrated in private or vocational (science and technology) universities, while students from well-off families have better chances to enter elite universities. Moreover, the gender segregation in different fields of study has not been improved as a result of the aforementioned massification. Female students are still concentrated in the humanities and social sciences and encounter more difficulties in finding jobs upon graduation. Consequently, these graduates' salaries tend to be much lower compared with their counterparts in science and technology fields. The study further argues that class and gender are actually intertwined and should not be examined separately. In addition, issues such as race and disability need to be closely examined, as the number of students with mothers from Southeast Asia and Mainland China has been significantly increasing in Taiwan these days. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the mechanism of the function and dysfunction of education reform in Taiwan. Three major types of problems leading to reform; Comparison to the educational reform in the United States; Features of the educational reform movement in Japan; Features of the Voluntary Study Program in Taiwan.