Taiwan leads East Asian countries in gender equality of legislatures with the highest ratio of female to male lawmakers, the Executive Yuan’s Gender Equality Committee (GEC) said in a statement yesterday.
Female lawmakers in Taiwan accounted for 41.6 percent of the Legislative Yuan in 2020, and rose to 42.5 percent this month, when Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Ching-yi (林靜儀) won a legislative by-election in Taichung’s second district, the committee said.
The updated figure is a new record and places Taiwan ahead of other countries in Asia, including Singapore and South Korea, the committee added.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
The United Arab Emirates has the highest proportion of female lawmakers in Asia (50 percent), and the third-highest in the world, the committee said in its report titled Gender At A Glance in the Republic of China (Taiwan), which it released yesterday.
Aside from an increase in female lawmakers, the proportion of female judges and the proportion of female ministers without portfolio have exceeded 50 percent, the report said.
In 2020, Taiwan also recorded the highest rate of female participation in the workforce in a decade among women aged 45 to 64 — 52.3 percent — while the percentage of women of all ages in the labor force rose by 1.5 percentage points to 51.4 percent from 2010 to 2020, it said.
During the same period, the percentage of men in the labor force rose 0.7 percentage points to 67.2 percent, it added.
In 2020, the average wage gap between male and female workers was 14.8 percent, 0.1 percentage points lower than a year earlier, it said.
However, gender bias remains prevalent in industries historically dominated by men, it said.
For example, in the construction industry, the percentage of registered female architects who applied to open their own firms was 8.46 percent, it said.
Further education and improvement in “personal safety and justice” are also needed, the report said, adding that females were victims in 80.4 percent of the 9,212 sexual assault cases reported in 2020.
Since 2020, the percentage of sexual assaults with female victims has increased, with 70 percent of sexual harassment and assault cases on school campuses involving women, it said.
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