Oct. 11, the International Day of the Girl Child declared by the UN in 2011, is now officially designated as “Taiwan Girls Day,” the Ministry of Health and Welfare said yesterday, joining the cause of recognizing girls’ rights and the importance of the empowerment of and investment in girls.
Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Tseng Chung-ming (曾中明) told a press conference in Taipei celebrating the first observance of the day that while Taiwan has shown much progress toward achieving gender equality in the past years, there is a lot more to be done.
He said that prenatal gender testing [for sex-selective abortion] is still a problem in the country.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipeu Times
According to the ministry’s data, the male-to-female sex ratio of newborns in the nation has always been higher than the average 1.05 to 1.06 reported by many other countries. And while the ratio has been down to 1.079 in 2011 from 1.09 in 2010, the sex ratio for women’s third birth and beyond is as high as 113.4 boys to every 100 girls.
An initiative to promote girls’ rights was announced by the Executive Yuan in March, incorporating resources of the government bodies in education, social affairs, law, communication, and health and welfare to tackle gender inequality on four major fronts — physical and psychological wellbeing, education and human capital investment, security and protection, and culture, in areas like mass media and traditions.
Female representatives from various walks of life at the press conference shared similarly unpleasant experiences when it came to the traditional views about girls, such as parents-in-law preferring a grandson or showing disfavor toward daughters or granddaughters, people saying there is no need for girls to be highly educated, or the view that women only need to worry about how to find themselves a good husband.
End Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes Taiwan secretary-general Lee Li-feng (李麗芬) said women are still being confronted by gender-based obstacles and called for a change in values, beginning with parents.
“Girls do not have to be treated as princesses, as they can be warriors who want to fight for their careers. They do not necessarily want or need Barbies, as they might like cars and dinosaurs better,” Lee said.
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