Survey Reveals What Holds Women Back in East Asia’s Engineering Workforce

Engineering in East Asia remains one of the most male-dominated professional fields in the world, and a new large-scale survey from Taiwan is now offering one of the most detailed pictures yet of why women’s participation in the industry lags so far behind. The study, published in the open-access journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, was conducted by Zheng-Yun Zhuang and Huang-Hsing Pan of the National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology. Its central aim was deceptively simple: to understand gender inequity in employment, or GIE, in East Asia’s engineering industry, using Taiwan as a window onto a region where the problem is widespread but often poorly documented.

The researchers built their evidence base through a large-scale, multi-channel survey carried out with a hybrid questionnaire design. Rather than relying on a single recruitment route, the team gathered responses through both online and offline channels, an approach that helped them reach women across different segments of the engineering labour market. The survey ran for an unusually long window: consent was collected from participants between July 2020 and June 2023, with data collection ending just two months after pandemic lockdown measures were lifted on 1 May 2023. That timing means the dataset captures a period of extraordinary disruption in working life, spanning the depths of COVID-19 restrictions and the uncertain return to normalcy that followed.

Methodologically, the study is notable for the care it took with participant protections. The research was exempted from formal ethics approval by Taiwan’s Construction and Planning Agency under the Ministry of the Interior, a decision documented in the agency’s file number 1090402, which was received by the Department of Civil Engineering at the National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology on 17 June 2020. The exemption rested on the fully de-identified nature of the investigation: potential respondents could only proceed with the questionnaire after agreeing to take part without exposing any identifiable information, no matter which survey channel they used. Written informed consent statements were displayed before every investigation, and participants were permitted to continue only after reading and agreeing to both their participation and the use of their answers for research purposes, including publication. In face-to-face interviews, which formed part of the offline channel, verbal explanation was used only to assist respondents in understanding the process.

Once the responses were in, the authors set about dissecting the background profiles of the female respondents and the employment patterns they reported. Descriptive statistics and suitable visualisation methods were then applied to extract two distinct categories of influence on the female labour participation rate, abbreviated in the study as FLPR. The first category comprises driving factors, the positive forces that push women into and up through engineering employment. The second comprises depressing factors, the negative forces that hold participation down. Separating these two categories matters, because interventions designed to encourage women and interventions designed to remove obstacles are not interchangeable, and the study suggests that conflating them can lead policy astray.

Beyond the measurable drivers and barriers, the researchers also turned their attention to mental factors that are commonly seen in discussions of women’s engineering careers but rarely examined in depth. These psychological dimensions, the authors note, are frequently acknowledged in passing yet seldom visited with empirical rigour. By including them in the survey analysis and linking them to the survey’s statistical findings, the study brings a layer of the gender-equity problem into focus that conventional employment statistics tend to miss entirely.

A distinctive feature of the work is what the authors call theory/report-reflexive evidence. Rather than treating the survey as a standalone dataset, they analysed the coupling between the survey results and available government and association reports, and then discussed the findings against public featured topics, including topics defined by the United Nations such as equivalent opportunities and occupational status. This triangulation allowed the team to test whether patterns visible in their Taiwanese sample resonate with, or diverge from, the institutional record in the region. It also anchored the analysis in internationally recognised frameworks for gender equity, giving the findings relevance beyond a single national context.

The reflexive exercise led the authors to revisit several questions that are frequently asked by researchers or raised by practitioners in the field, examining whether their results could provide empirical evidence for existing theories in the literature. This process yielded a set of implications that the authors highlight as particularly striking. Among them is the unsuitability of hiring female personnel through personal connections, a finding that challenges recruitment practices that remain common in many parts of the industry. Another is what the authors describe as the intriguing role of women’s major, meaning their field of study or degree title, which appears to elevate and depress the female labour participation rate in parallel. In other words, the same educational credential can open some doors in engineering while closing others, depending on how the specialisation maps onto industry demand and occupational expectations.

Perhaps the most consequential implication, however, concerns where policymakers should direct their attention. The study concludes that addressing the depressing factors affecting the female labour participation rate is more important than amplifying the driving ones. This framing inverts a common instinct. Initiatives that celebrate role models, promote engineering to schoolgirls, and highlight the rewards of the profession all serve to strengthen the positive forces, yet the authors’ evidence suggests that the binding constraint on women’s participation lies in the negative forces that push them out or keep them from entering at all. Removing barriers, on this reading, delivers more leverage than adding encouragement, and institutional decision-makers would do well to prioritise the former.

The practical audience for these findings is explicitly identified. The authors state that the study adds to the knowledge set available to institutional decision-makers and policymakers seeking to alleviate gender inequity in employment in the region. Given that East Asia’s engineering sector is a cornerstone of the global technology supply chain, the stakes extend well beyond Taiwan. Persistent underrepresentation of women in engineering careers represents not only an equity failure but, by implication, a substantial loss of talent to industries that depend on technical expertise for their competitiveness.

The research also reflects the collaborative infrastructure behind modern survey science. The authors acknowledge Ph.D. candidate You-Shen Cheng and M.Sc. Han-Wei Lai for their support at the data curation and data pre-processing stages of the survey, and for visualisation work carried out during the paper’s revision rounds. Financial support came from multiple Taiwanese government bodies, including the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Science and Technology under projects 108-2221-E-992-008-MY3 and 108-2221-E-992-007, and the National Science and Technology Council under projects 112-2410-H-992-014-MY2 and 115-2410-H-992-050-MY2. The article was received by the journal on 24 May 2025, accepted on 7 October 2026, and published on 19 October 2026 as an open-access contribution under a Creative Commons licence, making the full evidence base freely available to researchers, employers, and policymakers across the region and beyond. As East Asia confronts demographic pressures and intensifying competition for skilled engineers, the study’s core message is likely to travel far: the path to gender equity runs not through louder encouragement, but through the systematic dismantling of the factors that hold women back.

Subject of Research: Gender inequity in employment and women's labour participation in East Asia's engineering industry

Article Title: Gender inequity in employment in East Asia’s engineering industry: exploratory analysis and theory/report-reflexive evidence from a survey

Article References: Zhuang, Z.-Y., & Pan, H.-H. (2026). Gender inequity in employment in East Asia’s engineering industry: exploratory analysis and theory/report-reflexive evidence from a survey. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09526-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09526-5

Keywords: gender inequity, engineering industry, East Asia, female labour participation rate, Taiwan, survey research, occupational status, equal opportunity, women in STEM, labour market, policy, employment