The Executive Yuan has launched a comprehensive website that tracks the latest trends in gender equality in Taiwan and around the world.
The Gender Equality Observing Station (http://geo.ey.gov.tw) allows users to observe developments in Taiwan's cities and counties as well as other countries, and provides an easy-to-use search engine of gender-related news, research literature, statistics, policy implementation, regulations and multimedia resources. The website facilitates access to information while allowing the public to have a better understanding of the gender issues around them, which in turn will raise their awareness and help them protect their own rights.
The site was set up under the Phase IV E-government Program, where the Executive Yuan created a gender equality databank and launched a series of gender-equality themed websites from 2012 to 2016. The Executive Yuan further integrated the materials from these websites in 2016 and developed new applications and services to create the Gender Equality Observing Station.
The new website tracks progress in the seven areas highlighted in the government's Gender Equality Policy Guidelines: power, decision-making and influence; employment, economy and welfare; demography, marriage and family; safety and justice; education, culture and media; health and health care; and environment, energy and technology.
It also contains an observation map of developments in Taiwan and other countries, a news timeline function, and a search engine of multiple databases including the Executive Yuan Gender Equality Committee website, a gender statistics database, and a gender equality research literature resources network. In addition, the site is linked to an official Facebook page to share the information on social media.
To give the public an idea of how these databases are used, the "feature reports" section showcases five research papers on gender equality in Taiwan written by National Tsing Hua University using information from the databases.
One paper—an analysis of women's position in power, decision-making and influence—pointed out that women made up 35.5 percent of Taiwan's legislative body in 2014, putting the nation among the top one-third of all countries in the world and No. 1 in Asia. This percentage climbed further to 38.1 percent after the 2016 legislative elections, which approaches the northern European and European Union standard for political equality of a minimum of 40 percent participation by women or men. This research showed that Taiwan is ahead of other Asian countries and on a par with the world in terms of advancing women's political rights.