More than half of Taiwanese women would view sexual harassment in the workplace as a joke and would take no action, a poll released by the Ministry of Labor on International Women’s Day yesterday found.
It also found that 4.4 percent of women and 0.4 percent of men in Taiwan said they had suffered sexual harassment at work over the one-year period leading up to the poll.
Among the female workers, the sexual harassment came mainly from coworkers (47.7 percent), customers (38.6 percent) and supervisors (25.0 percent), the poll found.
Asked about how they would respond if confronted with sexual harassment on the job, 54.7 percent of the female respondents said they would laugh it off and take no action, while 33.4 percent said they would file a complaint.
On the issue of discrimination, the poll found that most companies in Taiwan said they would not treat an employee differently based on gender or sexual orientation.
According to the survey, 20 percent of employers said they would take gender into account when allocating tasks, and 6.6 percent said they would consider gender when determining wage and salary structures for their workers.
The survey also examined compliance with the Act of Gender Equality in Employment (性別工作平等法) and found that 78.1 percent of applications for family care leave were approved over the year leading up to the poll.
In the case of maternity leave, 94.7 percent of applications for up to eight weeks of leave were approved, the poll showed.
The poll was conducted in September last year, with 3,297 valid samples collected from employers and 4,514 from employees.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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