Although the proportion of women in the legislature has reached 30 percent, all the participants in the Mar. 9 presidential candidate debate were male: the two candidates, the host and the questioners. Women's issues and gender issues were not mentioned once.
In the two televised debates and one platform press conference, the main issues have been centered on cross-straits relations, foreign affairs, national security, the common market proposal, leadership styles and other issues traditionally perceived as being important national concerns.
The only topic that could possibly be seen as as a "women's issue" and which was barely mentioned, was the birth rate. Ironically, this issue was raised not because of a concern about women's development, but because the overall birth rate is too low and people are worried that women do not want children.
This is yet another reminder that politics in Taiwan is still a man's business; women have no real influence on key decisions.
Gender equality, however, is integral to democratic politics. Women's issues and gender viewpoints should be included when important national policies are decided. Issues that have long been promoted by women's civic groups include establishing a top level inter-governmental gender equality commission in the Cabinet and the formation of policies for public child care. Unfortunately, other than declarations on Women's Day by the two parties, these suggestions were not included in the debate topics.
When we further examine the "women's policies" of the two candidates, we discover that although both the pan-blue and pan-green camps have absorbed the various suggestions of civic women's groups in their policy proposals, their childcare policies only focus on providing cash allowances for child-minders or salary subsidies for parents who must take time from their work to care for their children. Long term planning on the issue of public child-care has been ignored.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) has not reached a breakthrough on the issue of labor rights for Chinese spouses and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has not clarified which level of the Cabinet his proposed gender equality organization would belong to.
Important national policies concerning demographics, health care, transportation, police and education still appear to ignore gender and women's issues. A gender equality commission within the Cabinet is needed to integrate the women's and gender policies that are currently among various agencies and ministries.
Hopefully organizers of televised presidential debates in the future will consider more diverse gender representation both in the procedures and questions. Gender issues are an important national concern. We also expect the two candidates to be more humble and liberal in terms of women's and gender issues in the future.
Fan Yun is the president of the Awakening Foundation and an assistant professor of sociology at National Taiwan University. Tseng Chao-yuan is secretary-general of the foundation.
TRANSLATED BY ANGELA HONG
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