Nearly half of LGBT+ people, or 49.7 percent, are concerned that their workplace relations would be affected if they came out at work, a survey released yesterday by two groups showed.
The respondents were also worried that disclosing their sexual orientation or gender identity at work could affect their chances at promotion or career development (38.2 percent), or that it could lead to bullying or harassment (35.5 percent), the survey conducted by Taiwan Tongzhi (LGBTQ) Hotline Association and Marriage Equality Coalition Taiwan showed.
Fifty-five percent of respondents said they came out to a “small number of colleagues,” while less than 30 percent said they came out to a direct supervisor or someone in a more senior position than themselves, the survey showed.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
One respondent, an engineer working for a technology firm in Hsinchu, said that he decided to come out at work because he was expecting to become a father and would have to ask for more time off.
Another respondent, a public servant from Kaohsiung, said that she came out at work so that she could “share the joy” with her colleagues if she marries one day and claim a financial aid that her employer offers to employees who marry.
According to the survey, 38.1 percent of respondents said there were employees at their workplace who were “openly out,” up from 27.3 percent in a similar survey conducted by the association in 2016.
Chiu Yu-fan (邱羽凡), an assistant professor of law at National Chiao Tung University, said that despite the increase, she believes there has not been much improvement in the daily lives of LGBT+ people, particularly in the workplace.
While there are legal protections against discriminatory practices in the workplace in Taiwan, their enforcement could be improved, she said.
According to the poll, 53.1 percent of respondents said their employers “do not have any gender-friendly measures or have never expressed LGBT-friendly views.”
About 70 percent of respondents said they hoped their employers would host “LGBT and gender-friendly courses, talks or educational training.”
Marriage Equality Coalition Taiwan chief coordinator Jennifer Lu (呂欣潔) called for cooperation to create work environments that are more friendly toward LGBT+ people.
Work is an important part of people’s lives, with some people spending more time with their colleagues than their family members, she said.
A majority of people who participated in the survey (84.3 percent) work full-time and more than half (58.7 percent) were aged 26 to 35.
Among the respondents, 74.5 percent identified as homosexual and 22.4 percent identified as bisexual, the groups said.
They said that 42.4 percent of respondents identified as cisgender male, 48.6 percent identified as cisgender female and 7.7 percent identified as transgender men or women.
The survey collected 2,121 valid responses online from Jan. 20 to March 2 and has a margin of error of 2.1 percentage points.
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
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
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