For years now, I have been particularly interested in gender studies. It came as some surprise when I learned that we used to have a special Women’s Day in this country, on March 8, but it was canceled in 1993 and combined with Children’s Day on April 4 to become Women’s and Children’s Day.
For me, the most surprising thing was that nobody, not even women’s groups, found anything objectionable about this, that no one saw it as equating women with mere baby-making machines and someone to look after the kids. So I would like to call on Taiwanese to support a second drive to increase women’s participation in politics.
One idea would be to make changes to the single electoral district, two-vote system. Instead of casting one vote for a candidate and one vote for a party, each voter could cast two ballots within an electoral district — one for a male and one for a female candidate. The respective vote counts could then be separated, and the man and woman with the most votes in his or her own category would then be elected the male and female legislators in the district. This new system, which would be perfectly easy to implement, would not only promote gender equality in politics but also serve as a foundation for future social reforms.
Women represent half the population of the country, and this ought to be reflected in the number of seats they hold in the legislature.
There are, I would suggest, a number of very good reasons why this should be. First of all, women are actually the largest disadvantaged group.
We already have so-called gender equality in education, the workplace and politics, but this has been quite superficial, and doesn’t really offer anything substantial. Men and women are different physically, psychologically, socially and culturally.
The original idea behind “rule by both sexes” was to have men and women working together in the same environment. Their inherent differences, however, mean that they are not competing on an even playing field. We don’t mix the men’s categories with the women’s in the Olympics, do we?
Second, past form tells us that women are more likely to take an interest in vulnerable or disadvantaged groups such as women, children, the disabled, laborers and ethnic minorities, and are more likely to do more for them. As a result, having the number of women in the legislature represent the proportion of women in the wider population would not only ensure that women as a group are given the rights they deserve, it would also extend the benefit of the legislative process to other vulnerable groups.
This would be far preferable to an electoral system that allocates legislative seats based on the number of votes a political party receives.
Third, in the 2008 elections, the first time the single electoral district, two-vote system was put to the test, we saw smaller political parties or individuals squeezed out on the pretext that the elections were about national issues and required specialized competencies. This benefited neither local communities nor regional areas. Power attracts power, parties turn into political leviathans, and we see a conspicuous gap emerging between what is good for the party and what is good for the people.
If Taiwan wants to lead the world in having gender equality in politics, we have to leave behind the patriarchal politics of the West and develop our own democratic model that incorporates gender equality.
Electoral reform would be a great place to start. The problem is, and what we have learned from the experience of women’s movements in the past, that if we want to have “good politics” with women’s participation, we cannot rely on the industry and commitment of women alone.
We will also need men to take an active part in the process. And if they do, this will indeed be a crucial step in the right direction, a gender politics built on the concerted efforts of both sexes.
Wu Cheng-chong is an assistant professor of geography at National Taiwan University.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG AND PAUL COOPERE
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