Taiwan ranks first in Asia and sixth in the world for gender equality, according to a self-assessment published on Tuesday by the Executive Yuan’s Gender Equality Committee.
The committee said that its rankings were based on the Gender Inequality Index introduced in 2010 by the UN Development Programme.
The composite index measures inequality between female and male achievement in three areas — reproductive health, empowerment and the labor market.
The index ranges from 0, which indicates that men and women fare equally, to 1, which indicates that women fare poorly.
As Taiwan is not a member of the UN, it does not appear in the official rankings.
However, by applying the criteria from the index, the committee calculated that Taiwan’s 2019 reading was 0.045, placing it sixth worldwide and first in Asia.
In the 2019 ratings, Switzerland was first with a score of 0.025, followed by Denmark (0.038) and Sweden (0.039), it said in a report.
In Asia, Taiwan’s rating was better than South Korea’s (0.064, No. 12 worldwide), Singapore’s (0.065, No. 13) and Japan’s (0.094, No. 25), the committee said.
The labor force participation rate for women aged 15 or older in Taiwan was 51.4 percent, compared with 67.3 percent for men, it said.
Despite the gap, female participation grew at nearly double the rate of men over the prior 10 years, it said.
In terms of pay difference, women made 14.2 percent less than men in 2019 — an average of NT$291 per hour compared with NT$340 for men — which was a 3.7 percentage point improvement from a 17.9 percent gap 10 years earlier, it said.
The report said that gender stereotypes, such as ideas that men should study science while women should study the arts, can have long-lasting effects on gender segregation in the workplace.
For example, the proportion of female professional researchers in Taiwan — 22.6 percent — is higher than in South Korea and Japan, but remains significantly lower than the UK (38.6 percent) and Finland (33.7 percent), the committee said.
Fewer than 25 percent of Taiwanese workers in the construction, home improvement and transportation sectors are women, the committee said.
In the transportation sector, the Taipei MRT rail system had the highest proportion of female drivers at 22.5 percent, while the Taiwan Railways Administration had the lowest at 1.2 percent, the report said.
Taiwan passed a marriage equality law in May 2019, under which 1,257 male couples and 2,830 female couples were married in the first year since its enactment, it said.
Costa Rica sent a group of intelligence officials to Taiwan for a short-term training program, the first time the Central American country has done so since the countries ended official diplomatic relations in 2007, a Costa Rican media outlet reported last week. Five officials from the Costa Rican Directorate of Intelligence and Security last month spent 23 days in Taipei undergoing a series of training sessions focused on national security, La Nacion reported on Friday, quoting unnamed sources. The Costa Rican government has not confirmed the report. The Chinese embassy in Costa Rica protested the news, saying in a statement issued the same
Taiwan’s Liu Ming-i, right, who also goes by the name Ray Liu, poses with a Chinese Taipei flag after winning the gold medal in the men’s physique 170cm competition at the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation Asian Championship in Ajman, United Arab Emirates, yesterday.
Temperatures in New Taipei City’s Sindian District (新店) climbed past 37°C yesterday, as the Central Weather Administration (CWA) issued heat alerts for 16 municipalities, warning the public of intense heat expected across Taiwan. The hottest location in Taiwan was in Sindian, where the mercury reached 37.5°C at about 2pm, according to CWA data. Taipei’s Shilin District (士林) recorded a temperature of 37.4°C at noon, Taitung County’s Jinfeng Township (金峰) at 12:50 pm logged a temperature of 37.4°C and Miaoli County’s Toufen Township (頭份) reached 36.7°C at 11:40am, the CWA said. The weather agency yesterday issued a yellow level information notice for Taipei, New
A year-long renovation of Taipei’s Bangka Park (艋舺公園) began yesterday, as city workers fenced off the site and cleared out belongings left by homeless residents who had been living there. Despite protests from displaced residents, a city official defended the government’s relocation efforts, saying transitional housing has been offered. The renovation of the park in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), near Longshan Temple (龍山寺), began at 9am yesterday, as about 20 homeless people packed their belongings and left after being asked to move by city personnel. Among them was a 90-year-old woman surnamed Wang (王), who last week said that she had no plans