TW: abuse, harassment, suicide

The inequality faced by Taiwanese women in the fields of education, workplace, and daily life 

Preamble: speaking up for women 

Although Taiwan appears to be a prosperous and modern country located in East Asia with a developed economy and technology, local news reports frequently feature tragic cases of female suicides, often victims of sexual violence. Figure 1 shows the reporting rates of female and male suicides at different age distributions, and we can see that the proportion and number of females are much higher than those of males. This also brings up a problem.

What factors in Taiwanese culture have a negative impact on women and lead them to commit suicide?

Figure 1. Taichung City Government Health Bureau - Gender Analysis of Suicide Reports

This paper attempts to comprehensively examine the phenomenon of Taiwanese women within the asymmetric power structures of education, the workplace, and daily life. In Professor Martha C. Nussbaum’s book, “CITADELS OF PRIDE: Sexual Assault, Account, and Reconciliation”,  the objectification of women by power mentioned in the book is omnipresent in all areas of women’s lives, meaning that women are not recognized as possessing full and equal humanity. 

Today, this is noticeable in the lives of Taiwanese women who are still culturally expected to be inherently gentle, focusing on their appearance by maintaining a slender body, and remaining politely silent on most matters. Moreover, society frequently assumes that women should use their bodies as bargaining chips in exchange for power. These societal expectations place on women a complex, intertwined process of instrumentalization by objectification,  lifelessness by limitation, replaceability by male superiority, vulnerability to violation, and silencing by minimization.  To unpack and explore these processes, we need to better understand what women experience in the field of education and the other faces of their lives.

Taiwanese female students lack female leaders as role models in the educational field.

In Taiwan, women continue to face inequality, while men are endowed with substantial privileges, and manhood has positive symbolic connotations. There is still an invisible wall in the pursuit of women's paths in the family, in study, and in the workplace, preventing them from showing their own characteristics and talents in the public world. For example, the education sector is still full of gender inequality problems.   

Firstly, reports on gender in management from national institutions such as the Ministry of Education and the Executive Yuan show that the main leadership in Taiwan's secondary schools are still biased towards men. Furthermore, a ‘masculine’ management style is utilized in the teaching scene, demanding absolute obedience from students. This is because Taiwan’s secondary school leaders believe that only the ‘majesty’ of masculinity can tame and discipline students, leading schools to hire more masculine teachers. For instance, it is common in Taiwan’s secondary schools to hire military officers to supervise students’ daily lives. These supervisors are mainly men (as seen in the chart below).

Figure 2. Number and ratio of female senior high school principals

This male-dominated leadership can also be classified into two parts: the minority of instructors with less dominating temperaments will lead the trainees to correct their daily behaviors through communication, while the majority of stricter instructors will manage the trainees based on the military education they received in the army. However, the rigid rules that are superficial and embedded by force and fear in students' minds inhibit them from learning and cause them to think about their mistakes only superficially. Such a condition causes students to repeatedly do the same thing every time they have the same problem in the future since they fail to effectively note the root of the mistake and fail to assimilate it as a motive for change.

The current state of Taiwan’s secondary education is thus based on a gender imbalance in leadership positions and the influence of long-standing, authoritarian education concepts. In the past, because of ‘feminine’ expectations, female leaders often chose to adopt a less authoritative teaching style which limited their career progress, but as generations changed, the modern educational philosophy for children made them tend to adopt a much more authoritative teaching style. Some female leaders therefore managed to become principals by adhering to such authoritarian discipline. However, these female principals are in the minority.

Many female leaders, whether it is the president or the principal, are still questioned by the public as to whether they have strength and ability to manage their position.  In public consciousness, women are still seen as emotional leaders, lacking the ability to perform tasks. According to Taiwan’s National Institute of Education, female leaders are especially more emotional than male leaders, while differences in other leadership traits are obscure compared to that of men, as shown below. 

Figure 3. Gender Differences in Evaluations of Principal Candidates

Based on “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” American sociologist Erving Manual Goffman states that charismatic leaders make personal decisions and force everyone to accept the results. Even if the results are not always ideal, leaders' decisiveness and action can still win public admiration. The power of these charismatic leaders lies in their strong personal influence and confident display to the outside world.

In the book “What Kind of Life Do You Want to Live”,  Ueno Chizuko, a sociologist at the University of Tokyo, Japan, states that since most Japanese women don't completely understand themselves, they will easily cede the dominance of life to their parents, school, marriage, and children. Many young women in Taiwan appear to face similar dilemmas, often feeling lost in defining their self-image and pressured by traditional roles. This makes it difficult for them to fully tap their potential, especially in some STEM fields.Therefore, to relieve the burden of pressure on women, Taiwan’s education sector should provide students with more ideal female leaders as role models and also give female students more space to explore their self image. 

Taiwanese women in the workplace “ceiling” and “risk of sexual violence”   

Besides in education, not enough is done to recruit and retain Taiwanese women in other traditionally gender-imbalanced roles, such as the police force. The admission quota of male and female students to the Taiwan Police College was significantly skewed: 1817 male applicants admitted, while only 203 female applicants were accepted. Based on this ratio, we can find that increasing the admission rate of men will reduce the admission chances of women.  Furthermore, in Taiwan, other key roles in the public domain — such as legislative members, and university professors — likewise exhibit a significant gender imbalance. 

These imbalanced gender ratios can be seen in areas like academic research and national politics, as seen in the figures below, from the government and university leadership. A policy to address this imbalance must be urgently developed and implemented.

Figure 4. Gender ratio of members of the 11th session for Legislative Yuan 

Figure 5. Gender Ratio of Professors in Tertiary Institutions

Today's society gives women the impression that to succeed, they need to be strong and not too weak, and that society values ​​"ability" and "achievement". These traditional ‘male’ qualities make many women think that their value lies in whether they can do well, and whether they can get recognition from others. However, this may be opposite to the traditional female role which requires them to let men be dominant. This is a difficult and contradictory path to follow.

Nevertheless, if society can increase women's learning opportunities and develop knowledge in STEM fields, they may be able to break through the limitations brought by traditional culture and pursue all the careers they really enjoy, thus becoming more confident and independent.

However, within Taiwan's mainstream educational environment, especially in STEM fields, female students usually face excessive competition because men are favoured more, which means that for women, STEM careers are less about self-exploration and are more stressful. This author believes that the educational environment should allow female students to develop many choices, and deepen their inner world through education without such limitations.

Even after entering the job market, female students are likely to face an invisible ceiling in career advancement, as well as the ubiquitous shadow of sexual harassment and sexual violence. A case analysis by the Ministry of Labor's Employment Equality Network shows that many company executives invite female employees to meet privately under the pretext of discussing business matters. If the male bosses are rejected, they may use their superior status as leverage to put pressure on the female employees.

This pervasive issue of gendered power imbalances is not confined to the workplace and spills over into private lives, as seen in the case of Taiwanese female author Lin Yi-Lan. She writes about being sexually assaulted by a pre-exam ‘cram’ school teacher as a teenager and discusses the social taboos and discrimination that survivors face.The scrutiny of public opinion and assumption that the woman's inappropriate behavior led to the assault silences many who endure this experience. “Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise”, Lin Yi-han's first book published in 2017, fully explores the plight of victims of sexual assault in Taiwan who are forced to endure alone, unable to speak out  for themselves under the pressure of the social structure. After she published her book, Ling Yi-Lan nearly ended her life because of the public backlash. 

These incidents that shocked the Taiwanese media show that even today in Taiwan's educational field and workplaces, there are still many powerful men who abuse their authority to force women to have unwanted sexual contact  even by violence. Female students and working women are frequently forced to accept this kind of contact for fear of losing their reputations and jobs. Furthermore, the reason why Taiwanese women often suffer in such incidents is that women’s bodily autonomy is not taken seriously. When women’s reproductive organs are invaded, women are generally labeled as ‘dirty’, which deepens the indelible scars in the victims’ memories, but the original family and social structures do not have the capacity to understand the complexity of such tragedies.

Though Taiwan still has a long way to go to fully protect women from sexual harassment and assault, the government and non-governmental organizations are making changes to ensure that much needed protections are in place. Taiwan’s Gender Equality Education Act officially came into effect on Women’s Day, March 8, 2025, and completely bans underage teacher-student relationships. Fortunately, the public's understanding and support for victims of sexual violence has increased. For example, on December 26, 2024, many Taiwanese mainstream news media reported that a manager of a McDonald's in Taipei City sexually assaulted a 17-year-old female student who was working there and studying part-time. To speak up for the victimized women, people on social media frantically forwarded the news and announced a collective retaliation by not consuming the company's products.

Conclusion

This author believes that the problem of scarcity of psychological resources faced by Taiwanese women can be solved from the following three aspects. First of all, in the education field, students should be provided with books or even a permanent course on issues related to gender equality, so that women and vulnerable groups can recognize the traps of gender discrimination in advance and be prepared to prevent them.

Furthermore, society should pay attention to the secondary harm caused to the victims by the "culture of silence"due to gender role differences. Therefore, gender equality and sex education should be continually promoted in schools and companies to help the general public realize the seriousness of gender discrimination and promote a "zero tolerance" attitude towards sexual violence.

Finally, this author believes that Taiwan should more clearly promote and enforce laws to protect women and vulnerable groups in the workplace. In order to prevent employees from being sexually assaulted, the Taiwan government has already established the Gender Equality in Employment Act and the Gender Equality in Education Act to specifically target employers who often use their power to coerce women. However, in the cases mentioned, these laws have not been implemented in a timely manner. For example, the "Gender Equality in Employment Act" mentioned that power harassment can be fined up to NT$1 million (30 million USD), but in fact, many company executives are not willing to pay any fines to their subordinates and manage to avoid doing so. When sexual harassment occurs, it is often glossed over as ‘unintentional’, forcing the female victims to keep silent for fear of offending their superiors. 

In addition, the government should also add a law specifically to protect women employees’ rights. Many women dare not disclose abuse and discrimination; part of the reason is because companies often force women to hide this matter by threatening to fire them. If the law can add a regulatory clause to ensure that no company should fire female staff  because of such complaints, women would be more courageous to speak out about the violations they have suffered. In this way, by legal, educational, and cultural measures, the Taiwanese nation can gradually minimise the tragedy of female abuse and suicide, and reach its proper potential.