Attitudes toward gender equality have continued to improve, especially toward marriage equality, with more than 60 percent of people now agreeing that same-sex couples should have the right to marry, an Executive Yuan survey found ahead of today’s two-year anniversary of Taiwan’s marriage-equality legislation.
The Cabinet’s Gender Equality Committee yesterday announced the results of its annual telephone survey on attitudes toward gender issues.
A total of 5,871 couples have registered marriages from May 24, 2019 — when the Legislative Yuan legalized same-sex marriage — to April 30, the committee said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The survey showed that support for marriage rights has continued to rise, with 60.4 percent of respondents expressing support compared with 52.5 percent last year, it said.
The figure also represents a significant increase of 23 percentage points from before legalization in 2018, when 37.4 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, it added.
To the question of whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children, 67.2 percent of respondents agreed, and 72.2 percent said that same-sex couples are just as capable of raising children as mixed-sex couples, up from 68.7 percent last year, the survey found.
These results show that the right for same-sex couples to start families is gradually gaining recognition and acceptance among the public, the committee said.
Attitudes toward transgender issues have also shown improvement, it said.
The committee said that 65.1 percent of respondents said that they were willing to share a public bathroom with trans people, up 3.1 percentage points from last year, it said.
Meanwhile, 76 percent agreed that trans people should be able to dress however they feel most comfortable while at school or in the workplace, while 88.9 percent said they were willing to work with transgender colleagues, the survey showed.
Gender stereotypes are also gradually loosening, including the beliefs that women are responsible for housework and are not suited for scientific jobs, the committee said.
Eighty percent of respondents disagreed with the statement that “a wife should spend more time on housework than her husband,” up 3.9 percentage points from last year, the survey showed, while 93.7 percent disagreed that women are not suited to studying science and technology.
Meanwhile, 89 percent said that women are just as capable of holding senior management positions, while only 35.7 percent agreed that men are more suited to working as bus drivers, down 5.9 percentage points from last year, it showed.
The survey reveals the progression in national attitudes toward gender each year, the committee said, vowing to continue promoting measures aimed at creating a more just society.
The survey, held from May 13 to 15, collected 1,080 valid responses and has a margin of error of 2.98 percentage points.
In related news, the Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights yesterday called on the government to write marriage equality into the Civil Code, as a 2018 referendum barring such an amendment is set to expire today.
Bound by a Council of Grand Justices decision that ordered the legalization of same-sex marriage and a referendum banning a Civil Code amendment to do so, the Legislative Yuan in 2019 passed a separate law to legalize same-sex marriage: the Act for Implementation of Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748 (司法院釋字第七 四 八號解釋施行法).
However, the act left a number of discrepancies in the rights enjoyed by same-sex and mixed-sex couples, failing to legalize certain transnational marriages, adoption of unrelated children and artificial reproduction for same-sex partners, among other rights.
Over the past two years, Taiwanese society has become enriched by the appearance of more diverse families, yet there have also been a number of lawsuits fighting for equal marriage rights, the alliance said.
The two-year validity period of the referendum is about to expire as stipulated in Article 30 of the Referendum Act (公民投票法), it said, adding that starting from now, the government has the chance to amend the Civil Code to fill in the gaps and make marriage truly equal.
Additional reporting by Lo Chi
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
RSS