Dress code and appearance requirements for female flight attendants are discriminatory and lag a decade behind other nations, the Taoyuan Flight Attendants’ Union said yesterday, as it petitioned the National Human Rights Commission to set clear rules to prevent gender discrimination in the airline industry.
China Airlines, EVA Airways and Starlux Airlines all require female flight attendants to wear pencil skirts, and have rules on makeup and grooming, union executive director Lin Yu-chia (林昱嘉) said while delivering the petition to the commission in Taipei.
Attendants can wear pants during annual safety training, but must wear pencil skirts, high heels and stockings when on duty, which would hamper their ability to respond in an emergency, Lin said.
Photo: Lin Hui-chin, Taipei Times
Gender-neutral uniform options are the norm globally and should be mandated by the commission, she added.
Additionally, although most flight attendants at EVA and China Airlines are women, many return from maternity leave to find that their seniority or performance gains have restarted, they have difficulty getting promotions and some are assigned unreasonable shifts, Lin said.
This unfair treatment makes many flight attendants hesitant to apply for maternity leave, she said.
The reason Taiwanese airlines lag behind other nations in gender equality is because they look at their flight attendants as a product, EVA Air Union chairperson Lee Ying (李瀅) said, adding that the designer who redesigned China Airlines’ uniforms even said they should “be evocative.”
Although people are now paying more attention to gender equality in the workplace, regulations need to be enforceable to keep companies from circumventing them, she added.
The Executive Yuan likes to say that Taiwan leads Asia on gender equality, but its airlines lag far behind its international peers, union secretary-general Chou Sheng-kai (周聖凱) said.
A decade ago, in 2013, Asiana Airlines was the last airline in South Korea to still require its female flight attendants to wear skirts, Chou said.
That same year, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea declared the rule discriminatory, requiring the airline to provide gender-neutral options, he said.
Yet all of Taiwan’s major airlines still maintain this requirement, which is not only highly discriminatory, but runs counter to the spirit of the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, he added.
The Executive Yuan in 2014 determined a similar rule among police to be discriminatory, he said, calling on the commission to do the same for flight attendants.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
RSS