關於工作和家庭之間的衝突，西方工業國家很早就開始探討此議題，但經濟全球化使得工作和家庭之間的拉扯問題在發展中國家更顯重要。本文使用2002年和2012年的台灣社會變遷基本調查之性別和家庭組資料進行分析。本文以非原住民婦女且其家中有還未上小學的小孩者為研究對象，檢視她們面對工作和家庭拉扯時如何進行抉擇。本文從比較利益和機會成本的理論觀點提出三組非完全互斥的研究假設：弱假設、半強假設、強假設。研究結果支持弱假設和半強假設。在控制其他因素之後，發現太太在面臨工作和家庭之間的抉擇時會考量自身在人力資本投資上的機會成本。太太對就業與否及選擇何種就業類型的傾向、偏好和認知很明顯受到機會成本考量的影響，甚於先生和太太之間的比較利益原則。

Research on work–family conflict has been conducted primarily in Western industrialized nations, but economic globalization has increased the importance of work–family trade-offs in developing countries. The data used in this analysis were derived from the gender and family module of two waves of the Taiwan Social Change Surveys conducted in 2002 and 2012. We examined a sample of nonaboriginal women with no children enrolled in elementary school to determine how they address work–family trade-offs. This study proposes that two mechanisms (comparative advantage and opportunity cost) be applied separately to three nonopposing hypotheses: weak, semistrong, and strong. By combining the results of opportunity cost and comparative advantage models, we determined that the weak and semistrong hypotheses were supported. After we offset the impact of other variables such as the cohort effect and survey year, the main factor for a wife to consider when addressing work–family trade-offs was the opportunity cost of her own investment in human capital. This cost consideration had a more prominent impact on the wife’s tendencies, preferences, and awareness regarding employment and her employment status than did the principle of comparative advantage between the husband and wife.