About 4.3 percent of women aged 15 to 64, or 366,000 people, live alone, up from 2.9 percent in 2015 and 2.6 percent in 2011, a Ministry of Health and Welfare study found.
Divorced or separated women accounted for the highest percentage — 17.3 percent of divorcees and separated women live alone, while 11.6 percent of widows do, the data released on Thursday showed.
According to a 2017 survey, there are about 3.8 percent more women living alone who are 65 or older than the percentage of men in the same age group.
Women 35 or younger are more likely than those in other age groups to live alone or with friends, classmates or coworkers as opposed to with family, the Social and Family Affairs Administration said.
Women aged 35 to 44 are most likely to live with family at 96.1 percent, but the figure drops again as age increases, as 6.6 percent of those aged 55 to 64 live alone, it said.
Commenting on the data, Wu Wei-ting (伍維婷), assistant professor at the Shih Hsin University Graduate Institute for Gender Studies, said other than women having a slightly longer life expectancy, the increase in the percentage of women living alone could also be attributed to the higher divorce rate, which has hovered around 2.3 couples per 1,000 people over the past few years.
Of these divorcees, 60 percent are women 44 or older who decide to divorce after their children entered junior-high or high school, she said.
Considering only about half as many women as men choose to remarry, the number of women living alone is bound to increase, she added.
The phenomenon could also be attributable to the increasing tendency for women to not marry at all, Wu said.
As of the end of the last year, the percentage of unmarried women aged 40 to 64 was 13 percent, Ministry of the Interior data showed.
In a society that still has not achieved gender equality, women receive less benefit from being married than men, Wu said, adding that even a working wife spends three times as long on housework as her husband.
As the government considers how to provide long-term care for an aging population, it should take into account the gender discrepancy among those who live alone, Wu said.
“As the government creates long-term care facilities, it can expect that more women than men will be living alone,” she said. “Certain infrastructure in elderly daycare centers and apartments should be adjusted, such as the number of public toilets, while women also tend to care more about privacy than men.”
Although more women are living alone, they are more likely than men to seek social connection, Academia Sinica Institute of Sociology assistant researcher Alice Cheng (鄭雁馨) said.
Increasing numbers of men are also choosing not to marry, which could soon lead to unmarried people constituting one-quarter of the entire eligible population, Cheng said, urging the government to think of ways to support people who are single and live alone.
A 45-year-old woman who plans not to marry or find a partner said that she would prefer to live a carefree life and plans to find other single women to live with in her old age, Cheng said.
However, she said that she worries most about being unable to find someone to serve as her medical power of attorney and her companions dying before her, leaving her to die alone, Cheng added.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching