President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) started her second term in office on May 20 following the previous day’s announcement of the members of her Cabinet. The list showed that out of 42 Cabinet members, including the premier and vice premier, the 32 ministers and heads of agencies, and eight Cabinet officials only three were to be women.
This serious gender imbalance has caused a public outcry, with many civic groups objecting to the Cabinet’s makeup.
Some critics called it the most male-dominated Cabinet in history and a slap in the face for Taiwan’s gender equality movement, which has been struggling toward its goals for three decades.
Does the disproportionately small number of women in the Cabinet really matter? Indeed it does, and its importance needs to be discussed.
Executive Yuan Secretary-General Li Meng-yen (李孟諺) said that the small number of women is due to Cabinet members having been appointed based purely on merit.
Many Taiwanese are influenced by traditional political views whereby the selection should be based on strong morals and ability. This idea is so prevalent that even some women might agree with Li’s explanation.
However, the logic of “merit-based selection”reveals three problems.
The first is gender prejudice, the second is doling out positions among party factions and the third is the small size of the available talent pool.
First, it implies that Taiwanese women are by nature not talented enough with regard to political expertise. The situation is similar to what prevailed during Taiwan’s authoritarian period, when Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) governments discriminated against ethnic Taiwanese, excluding them from participation in politics on grounds of merit-based selection criteria.
Second, it involves doling out positions to various factions, which the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) aims to keep in balance. In other words, the selection process involved calculations about various interest groups under the party’s umbrella.
However, the party still insists that Cabinet members were selected based on merit alone and that it did not need to consider gender.
Third, it shows that something is wrong with the DPP’s talent pool. To be specific, the party is small and narrow, and its factions are stuck in a male-dominated bubble.
If issues such as gender, community and disabilities were taken into consideration, it would widen the talent pool available for selection based on merit.
Thanks to Taiwan’s success in stopping the spread of COVID-19, Tsai and her first-term vice president Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) have made numerous appearances in international media.
Chen has won worldwide admiration for his expertise in epidemiology, while Tsai was given a lot of attention in the international media, also for being a female president.
For example, Tsai was listed in the New York Times’ April 30 editorial as one the female national leaders who have demonstrated strong leadership in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On April 24, the Guardian published an article praising Tsai and other female leaders including New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen for their outstanding performance in fighting the pandemic.
However, Taiwan is very different from these nations in one respect — the proportion of men and women in their Cabinets.
Out of 19 Finnish Cabinet members, including the prime minister, 12 are women, as are seven out of 16 in Germany, 10 out of 27 in New Zealand and seven out of 20 in Denmark.
As to the proportion of female Cabinet members, Finland comes first with 63.2 percent, followed by Germany with 43.7 percent, New Zealand with 37 percent and Denmark with 35 percent.
Taiwan looks very bad in comparison, with women accounting for just four of its 45 Cabinet members. Women make up a mere 8.8 percent of all Taiwan’s ministers, heads of Cabinet agencies and Cabinet officials.
There was a time when a quarter of the nation’s Cabinet members were women, but that achievement has vanished during Tsai’s presidency.
In 2000, the share of female Cabinet members in then- president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) Cabinet reached 20 percent and his successor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) also maintained at least 20 percent female members during his two terms in office.
Tsai, being Taiwan’s first female president, would be expected to make history by exceeding the numbers that were set under her predecessors.
What can the DPP do to compensate for its tarnished contribution to history?
Tsai should look back in history at the DPP’s contribution to institutionalizing women’s participation in politics and government.
The 1996 murder of Peng Wan-ru (彭婉如), then-director of the DPP’s Women’s Affairs Department, coincided with the DPP’s adoption of a quota that required at least one-quarter of the party’s candidates in elections to be women.
This resolution came to be a key factor in the institutionalization of women’s political participation.
In 2005, then-president Chen oversaw the introduction of a constitutional amendment stipulating a gender quota for the Legislative Yuan, which led to an increase in the share of female legislators from 20.9 percent in 2004 to 41.6 percent today.
Taiwan is in the top half of the world’s nations for women’s participation in government. In this respect, it is number one in East Asia, leaving China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore far behind.
In this year’s presidential election, more than 8 million Taiwanese voted for Tsai to remain in office.
Tsai should summon the resolve to fix the undesirable gender imbalance in the Cabinet. She should also launch a program encouraging diversity in the central government’s Cabinet and those of county and municipal governments.
Her administration should amend the Constitution and the Local Government Act (地方自治法) to stipulate fair gender proportions in governments of all three levels.
These moves are essential for demonstrating the government’s determination to put gender equality into practice. Just like her historic achievement of having made Taiwan the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage, Tsai should set a new record in Asia for gender equality in the Cabinet.
Hwang Shu-ling is a professor in the National Defense Medical Center’s Center of General Education and a member of the Executive Yuan’s Gender Equality Committee.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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