If comments left on Facebook are any indication, Taiwanese women are dissatisfied with how far women’s rights have advanced in today’s society, a women’s organization said yesterday ahead of International Women’s Day on Tuesday.
“Although Taiwan has been making legislative progress in protecting women’s rights over the past few years, the government has refused to promote gender equality as an important social value,” said Yang Wan-ying (楊婉瑩), chairwoman of the Awakening Foundation.
She said, for example, that officials did not fully consider women’s needs when they decided to boost the declining birthrate by giving out cash for childbirth.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
“What women really want is a high-quality public daycare system,” she said at a press conference.
“We are not vending machines into which you throw some coins in return for a baby,” wrote one Internet user, ridiculing the government’s plan.
Fan Yun (范雲), an associate professor at National Taiwan University’s Department of Sociology, added that although women are allowed up to six months of -maternity leave according to the Gender Equality in Employment Act (性別工作平等法), it is not uncommon for private employers to simply fire female workers who are pregnant and who apply for leave.
A visiting female academic from Beijing also shared her disappointment over gender stereotyping at the press conference, even among educated individuals.
“My best friend said that I abandoned my family in China just to have fun for myself, but I came here for research, just as my husband does when he visits the United States,” she said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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