Thank you so much. I know you record things. Let me give you a little background of the project. My colleague and I are working on a project about cabinet diversity. We were very struck that in a lot of the English language discourse, there’s a lot of attention on Canada, New Zealand, Finland for being very diverse.
We were actually struck that Taiwan seems to do just as well as these other countries, but it’s often not mentioned. We wanted to call attention to Taiwan’s success, and maybe some of its shortcomings in this regard. This is why I wanted to talk to you. If you can start, I would appreciate you telling me but what are your thoughts about diversity and inclusion in the central government?
The parliament is doing very well in this regard. More than 40 percent members of parliament are women. President, 100 percent women. That’s pretty good.
The gender mainstreaming work for the past 14 years and counting really helped to ingrain this gender mainstreaming inclusiveness into each and every ministry’s long-term budgets, proposals, and so on with gender impact assessments done.
As for rooms for improvement, I’m sure that you’re aware that in the cabinet, [laughs] it’s not that diverse. Which is why the Gender Equality Committee is set up in such a way so that the more imbalanced to any political agenda our cabinet is, then there’s correspondingly, the same amount of the bias happening on the civil society organization representative of our gender equality committee.
The GEC stays balanced. [laughs] That’s because there’s civil society organizations. Not because of our current ratio of women and LGBTIQ ministers.
What do you feel are the specific challenges women and LGBTQ+ individuals face in the political sectors?
Sure. The good thing about Taiwan is that we’re long past the time where there’s a glass ceiling and stereotypes of “people wearing skirts should not lead the army and navy.” [laughs] That was long past. [laughs]
Nowadays, I would say that, especially in my line of work, in science, technology, digital, especially cybersecurity, it is heavily imbalanced, especially in cybersecurity.
If you count the people pursuing advanced degrees or even just undergrad degrees in such a diverse in STEM, and in particular, in cybersecurity, the ratio is, in cybersecurity, something like nine to one or something like that. It’s not a good shape. [laughs] In the wider STEM, I believe it’s 75-25, 70-30. Not that good, either. There’s still this stereotype going on.
One of the things that we’re working on nowadays in the National Science and Technology Council, which was just sprung into existence yesterday, [laughs] declared that gender balance in STEM is one of their four key strategies going forward.
We’re working on, for example, making sure that the women who choose these lines of work get full recognition as early as middle school, especially senior high. They need, not just role models, but very real camps, like science fairs and so on, catered toward such career choices. That’s what we’ve been putting a lot of effort toward.
Personally, because programming, my field, has two translation in Taiwan. If we translate it as software engineering, 軟體工程, then it’s quite stereotyped. If we call it 程式設計, program design, or 數位系, digital undergrad degree, then that’s not biased. In design, the more diverse, the better.
There’s also a lot of conscious rewording going on in my line of work.
Interesting. Thank you. Do you have any thoughts on what could be done to improve diversity inclusion in public sectors?
Besides the actions I just mentioned?
Yeah. Other actions.
Sure. There are of course general-purpose regulations, such as that we should not set up committees in which there is less than one-third of any gender representation. That’s the absolute minimum. Each gender need to have at least one-third. There are two major genders.
Then the other thing that we do is to ensure a safe space for us. One example is our Youth Advisory Council, which looks at all the different configurations to find the places that are less safe for LGBTIQ people in particular.
In my office in the Social Innovation Lab, that’s the Section Three here in our road. Used to be an Air Force headquarter. On the ground floor, we’ve got four restaurants. One for each major gender, one for gender inclusive, and another for accessibility, like wheelchair accessible.
We make sure that it expands the space instead of cannibalizes existing spaces. That is the strategy we very consciously pursue, prompted by our Youth Advisory Council on that cabinet level.
Interesting. Do you think there are specific groups that need to be targeted to help, that need extra help to be able to enact change?
I’m sorry. I didn’t get that.
Are there other specific groups that you think needs extra support from the government?
Of course, yes. [laughs] There is a movement in the past few years about addressing period equity and peer stigma.
For low to middle-income people, nowadays, the municipal governments, after signing on this period equity work, they actually provide free templates and other materials for use in the public schools, universities, and things like that.
There’s a lot of CSOs, such as With Red (小紅帽) that works to basically educate everyone in the importance of this issue. When people think about taking care of vulnerable or marginalized people, often, period equity isn’t the first thing people think about because it was not overtly discussed by the society.
Nowadays, thanks to the CSOs, it become very fashionable even for mayoral candidates and mayors and so on to address this issue.
For the economically challenged people, this is a great way to merge this two-post gender mainstreaming work and taking care of economically vulnerable people together into such a very, publicity-wise, a very positive messaging campaign.
You mentioned that there’s a bathroom downstairs that’s for the disabled, for people with disabilities.
Do you know what are actions or what are policies that the government is taking to support them?
Yeah. That’s part of the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s work. I’m not directly supervising them. I do help with, for example, to support all 20 national languages, one of which is the Taiwanese sign language.
We work on it on a universal accessibility issue. Not just to work with people who are hard of hearing or cannot speak prefer sign language. Basically, it’s another mainstreaming. Accessibility mainstreaming work.
For example, we’re now working on plans to offer free video calls, interpreters, translations, and so on for people with speaking or hearing difficulties. There’s also a public campaign that educates people. You or I, one day or later, [laughs] we will probably be hard of hearing. There’s this whole spectrum.
We can all make it more friendly to people with that condition, because we may one day be benefiting from that as well. That’s the campaign that I was working on with some social innovators.
Of course, for our websites, we’ve long mandated that all government website need to pass the WCAG accessibility standard. It benefits not just people who have seeing difficulties. It must be machine-readable for the screen readers, it also helps the end-to-end, machine-to-machine API bridges. In a sense, a robot, a bot, is also people with seeing difficulties.
Again, there’s a lot of intersectionalities going on. Our public campaign is centered around, not just taking care for people who are heard of seeing, but seeing this as a way to open up our website designs so that they could be translated into the other 19 national languages, including indigenous ones.
That’s really exciting. That’s great. My last question for you is actually, do you feel that the general public supports women’s rights and LGBTQ rights?
Definitely. We’ve very successfully framed the conversation, especially right after the two referenda, and the one constitutional interpretation for marriage equality, so that it doesn’t hurt the old, more conservative family-to-family relationships.
I call this marrying the bylaws, but not the in-laws. Meaning that we take 結婚不結姻. That’s the Mandarin. Meaning that when two same-sex people wed, they wed as individuals, but they do not form kinship or 姻親 relationship with one another as family.
That avoided this whole question of do we call 兒婿 or 女媳 or some other 16 newfangled names. Rather, simply saying that families and families do not wed, but individuals do. To the individuals, it’s not really this discrimination. Kinship in civil code actually leads only to burdens, like having to support one another’s family, conflict of interest, and so on.
Strictly speaking, it made homosexual marriage actually superior [laughs] to heterosexual marriage in terms of duties that you have to carry because you’re enjoying the same rights. That’s one very, I would say, nuanced, eclectic, creative solution to the marriage equality debate.
Thank you very much. These were all the questions I had. This has been very enlightening. I appreciate you taking the time in your busy schedule. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you. All right. Have a good night.
(laughter)
Yes. Live long and prosper. Bye.