New Southbound Policy Portal

Fan Yun, a Taiwan female legislator, speaks at the 2021 Open Parliament Forum Dec. 3 in Taipei City. (Staff photo/Chin Hung-hao)
 

Taiwan recorded the decade’s highest rate of female participation in the workforce among women aged 45-64 years — 52.3 percent in 2020, according to the Cabinet-level Department of Gender Equality Jan. 22.

In a statement, the DGE said the overall percentage of women in workplaces increased by 1.5 percent point to 51.4 percent from 2010 to 2020. The average wage gap between male and female workers in 2020 was 14.8 percent, which is 0.1 percent point lower than a year earlier, it added.

Female lawmakers in Taiwan accounted for 41.6 percent of the total seats in the Legislature in 2020, and rose to 42.5 percent this month, when a female legislator won a legislative by-election in the central Taichung City’s second district, the DGE said.

The findings are contained in the DGE’s latest Gender at a Glance study. Conducted annually since 2006, the research adopts the same assessment methodology as the annual Gender Inequality Index survey published by the U.N. Development Program.

Based on the data used to compile the most recent U.N. GII, the DGE finds that Taiwan ranks sixth globally and first in Asia. Scoring 0.045 out of 1, where the higher the value, the greater the inequality, Taiwan ranks after Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium. Fellow Asian countries South Korea, Singapore, Japan and China finished 12th, 13th, 25th and 40th, respectively. (DL-E)