Taiwan Today

Taiwan is stepping up efforts to tackle discrimination against women.

In 2016, Taiwan joined a small and select group of countries including the U.K., Poland and later New Zealand and Iceland when it  elected its first female government leader, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文). In 2021, 41 percent of legislators in Taiwan were women, compared to 10 percent and 17 percent in Japan and South Korea, which have similar electoral systems. In fact, the 2016 election of Tsai can be seen as the culmination of over half a century of legislation, as Taiwan has employed gender quotas in elections since the early 1950s.

The 1947 constitution stipulated that there should be seats reserved for women at all levels of representative bodies. As a result, single nontransferable vote and multiple-member district electoral systems held 10 percent of seats for women. This meant that in districts with more than one seat, a certain ratio of places had to be awarded to women. If none won seats, the reserved seat rule was invoked, and the woman with the most votes replaced the lowest-voted male candidate, guaranteeing that at least one woman would be elected from the district. During the authoritarian era, there were few female candidates, so parties frequently needed to invoke the rule. After democratization, party competition intensified, and in the late 1990s the two major parties, the Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party, adopted gender quotas for their nomination process. By 2000, both parties required that a quarter of appointments to major party posts and nominations be earmarked for women. After electoral reform in 2005, Taiwan changed to the mixed member majoritarian system: now 70 percent of Legislative Yuan seats are elected by means of a single member district system, and 30 percent are elected through proportional representation. Additionally, the earlier positive discrimination quota system was removed.

Positive Change
However, as a direct result of pressure from women’s rights groups, quotas were then applied to party candidate lists. This was implemented by a separate 2005 constitutional amendment stipulating that the number of women on each party’s list cannot be less than half the total number of listed candidates. The efficacy of this incentive, which forces parties to invest in and cultivate female candidates, is evidenced by the fact that in the period of single-party rule, 28 percent of women in government depended on reserved seats for election, but by 2018 this was just 3 percent. While this background accounts for the visibility of women in the political life of the nation, the country has challenged itself further to give parity to women in all sectors of society, creating two bodies under the Executive Yuan (EY) that hold gender mainstreaming (GM) briefs for the government and wider society.

The first EY body, the Gender Equality Committee (GEC), was formed in 1997 to promote GE in government and integrate related policy across departments. The committee currently led by Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) meets several times a year and comprises part-time advisors including cabinet members, academics and representatives from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In 2011, the EY first issued Gender Equality Policy Guidelines, which were amended in 2017 and again last year. The guidelines formed six GEC task forces respectively led by the Ministries of Education, Foreign Affairs (MOFA), Health and Welfare, the Interior, Labor, and Science and Technology, reflecting the need to improve ubiquitous gender bias across all sectors of government and their concomitant spheres of influence.

A resolution by the GEC in 1999 established the Foundation for Women’s Rights Promotion and Development (FWRPD) to implement measures in six areas, namely policy and crucial measures; laws and regulations; projects; consultation on work implementation; promotion of legal awareness and human resource training; and research in related issues. Despite being officially excluded from international organizations such as the U.N., Taiwan has proactively pursued international standards promoted by the global body and GE is no exception. It was the FWRPD which oversaw Taiwan’s 2007 enactment of the 1981 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) Enforcement Act.

Reaching Out
The EY’s Department of Gender Equality (DGE) was set up in 2012 on recommendation of the GEC to supervise government departments in formulating administrative measures conforming to the U.N. CEDAW and going beyond government itself to impact society. In contrast to the GEC, the DGE is a ministerial-level cabinet with full-time paid staff charged with the creation and dissemination of gender-sensitive policies. The DGE is also responsible for collating reviews from government agencies and NGOs and then compiling a national report on the act’s implementation every four years for scrutiny by local and international bodies, with the fourth edition released in June. Where the GEC and the DGE come together is in their international outreach. The FWRPD under the GEC runs the Taipei City-based Taiwan Women’s Center, which has a mission to integrate local women-focused NGOs, act as a bridge for public and private WR organizations and provide a platform for participation in international WR dialogue. This includes the annual conferences of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Since the mid-2000s, the FWRPD has assisted representatives to attend CSW conference sideline meetings in New York each March. FWRPD Vice Director Huang Ling-hsiang (黃鈴翔) said, “We encourage local NGOs to expand international connections and recognition in GE development.”

Wider Remit
In recent years the FWRPD, in partnership with the MOFA, has carved out a proactive role for Taiwan in the NGO CSW parallel events by creating its own virtual meetings and forums. Titled “Taiwan Gender Equality Week [TGEW],” this year’s events opened with a Women’s Power Night held in the capital at historic Taipei Guest House. The guest of honor was Tsai, who said, “I very much look forward to the day when phrases like ‘female president’ and ‘woman president’ are things of the past. I’m proud to say that Taiwan is spearheading gender equality and women’s empowerment.” Tsai cited this year’s EY report ranking Taiwan first in Asia and sixth of 163 countries on overall performance in GE as well as its percentage of female lawmakers, currently 48 out of a total of 113. “When it comes to the international stage, we can proudly flag up that we come from Taiwan,” Huang said.

The 2022 CSW session focused on the environment with a Climate Justice Leaders’ Seminar and 30 online forums, the latter organized by Taiwan NGOs including New Taipei City-based The Garden of Hope Foundation (GOH) and Taipei-based Homemakers United Foundation (HUF). Forum organizers included local governments in Taipei, New Taipei and the central city of Taichung, which now all have dedicated GE departments. “Municipal governments are increasingly participating in a range of female-focused international activities,” Huang said.

Joining Forces
HUF and GOH are members of the National Alliance of Taiwan Women’s Associations (NATWA), the nongovernmental and nonprofit umbrella group for domestic WR organizations. It comprises over 40 NGOs coordinating information and resources among members. In particular, NATWA works with 10 other groups in the Women on Women’s Budget Alliance, which supervises the central government’s inclusion of GM into the annual budget on women’s affairs. NATWA has also worked since the mid-2000s as an advocate for government policymaking with WR groups, often using strategic constitutional litigation to bring about GE. NATWA chairperson and lawyer Chen Hsiu-fon (陳秀峰) views the adoption of CEDAW as crucial to Taiwan’s GM progress. Based in Tainan and a member of the southern city’s mayor-led Gender Equity Education Committee, she sees the country’s move to implement CEDAW as an integral part of its efforts to bring Taiwan’s laws and practices in line with U.N. covenants on civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. According to Chen Wen-wei (陳文葳), one of the board directors of the NGO Awakening Foundation (AF), raising female status and roles in public affairs has long been part of broader liberalization and democratization movements in Taiwan. AF was founded in 1982 in Taipei as a magazine publisher, five years before decades of martial law came to an end, and it then emerged as a pioneering feminist advocacy group. “Our role is essentially about moving against patriarchy, which exists in many forms throughout this society,” she said. Chen, who works for the Science and Technology Law Institute at state-backed Institute for Information Industry in Taipei, points to the implementation of gender legislation such as the Gender Equality in Employment Act, Gender Equity Education Act and Sexual Harassment Prevention Act promulgated in the 2000s as the fruit of grassroots work by NGOs such as AF.

  FWRPD Vice Director Huang, NATWA Chairperson Chen and AF Board Director Chen all agreed that GM is a work in progress. They named issues such as encouragement for girls to enter science and technology subjects at the tertiary level; poverty levels among female senior citizens; and the unpaid role of women as caregivers for family as challenges they are working on. Taiwan is not resting on the laurels of its success at integrating women into the political system but is continuing to work on raising parity for all women throughout society.
 

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw