「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

Gender Quotas in Taiwan1
Chang-Ling Huang (National Taiwan University)

Thank you for the introduction. It is really a great pleasure to be here and reallyan honor to share the Taiwanese experience with you.

Many people do notunderstand or know very little about Taiwan, mainly because we have been
isolated from the international community for a long time. That said, significant
efforts have been made in Taiwan in the past two to three decades of
democratization. We have been trying to connect what is going on in Taiwan withwhat is happening in the rest of the world. Today’s topic of gender quotas is one
such example. As shown in Figure 1. there are key differences in women’s
political representation in post-war Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Not only has Taiwan had a consistently higher percentage of female
parliamentarians, but moreover, in recent years, the gap has become evenmore significant. Korea has increased quite a bit in recent years, whereas Japan
has remained constantly below the 10% mark. You might want to know why
Taiwan has so many women in politics.
Figure 1. Female MPs in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan（%）
40
35 %
30
Taiwan25

S. Korea

20

Japan

15
10
5
0
1940

1

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

This is based on the presentation “Why Does Taiwan Have the Second Most Number of Women Elected in
Asia? :Reserved Seats and Candidate Quota” at the symposium held on July 30th in Tokyo.

27

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

Actually, the percentage of women in parliament in Taiwan has been quite highby Asian standards, and notably within the East Asian context.
The most recent parliamentary election in this past January 2016 yielded 38.1
percent of women, an increase of 4.5 percent since 2012. This is encouraging.
The most recent local elections were held in November 2014 and as shown in
Table 1. The highest level of women’s representation is in the six major cities of
Taiwan. Out of the 375 council members in the six major cities, the average
percent of elected women council members reached 35.47%. The numbers in
the right-most column are the highest outlyers, and the top performer was thesouthern city of Tainan, which boasts fully 40% elected women.
For counties and smaller cities, there are a total of 500 councilors. The average
percentage of elected women is 27.26% and the top performer also reachedclose to 40%. Finally, the township councils are for the smallest, most local
level of elected representatives. Nationwide there are more than 2,000 council
members and the average percent of elected women is 22%; the top performer
reached 35 to 36%.
Table 1. Female Representatives in Taiwan
Percentage of
Womenlegislators(%)

The highest

33.6%

33.6%

Six Big Cities

35.47%

40.35%Counties/Cities

27.26%

39.47%

townships

22.48%

35.56%

villages/lis

13.95%

22.86%

Parliament（2012）

Local Councils（2014）

Source: Author

28

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

The last figure presented here are not for councils, but rather for the heads ofvillages or lis (村，里), the most basic unit of government in Taiwan. There are
13% women heads of villages (村長，里長) in the rural and urban areas. If you
compare that with the number of women heads of villages in Japan or South
Korea, Taiwan is clearly the high performer. Not only the percent of womenparliamentarians is higher in Taiwan, but Taiwanese women are also better
represented in local politics than our neighbors, Japan and South Korea.
If we want to know why Taiwan has so many women in politics, some people
might argue that rapid post-war economic development has contributed to
Taiwanese women being highly educated and thus very qualified. That is true,
but I think that is the same for Japanese and Korean women, because women’shigh educational attainment has been a common phenomenon in East Asia.
Korea and Japan both have highly educated and capable women too, and thus
some people might think that Taiwan has a more gender-equal culture, andthat there is more openness to gender equality. Well, if you look at social
customs, Taiwan still has a long way to go. If you ask any person in Taiwan
about the prevailing social norm for family property inheritance, then you would
see that parents still tend to leave more property to their sons than to theirdaughters. Or sometimes they leave all the property to their sons, not to theirdaughters. Even though the law changed many years ago, and Taiwanese civil
law basically states that daughters and sons have the same and equal
inheritance rights, nonetheless, the prevailing social practice is that parents do
not honor their equal rights.
How do parents violate the law? It’s very simple. The Taiwanese practice is tofill out a form whereby you abandon your rights to property inheritance. Manydaughters are asked to fill out this form upon a request from either theirparents or their male siblings, the older and younger brothers who aredesignated by their parents to inherit the family property. A lot of the womenfeel obligated to comply with this demand from their parents or male siblings.
They fill out the form and willingly give up the rights to inherit a portion of thefamily property. I believe a lot of them may not in fact be that willing, but the29

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

social pressures can be very strong. If we look at Taiwanese familial culture,then we see that Taiwan is not more gender equal.
In fact, the reason for the higher percentage of women in politics is quite
simple from a research perspective. It has a lot to do with the institutional
design of the electoral system that I wish to share with you, and specifically, it
is about the role of gender quotas. This institutional design actually allows more
Taiwanese women to be in politics. The adoption of gender quotas in many
countries has contributed to a global trend. Some people have already noticed
this fact, and within academic circles of scholars researching gender issues orgender equality, many have noticed the development of this global trend overthe past 20 years, since the 1990s. Currently more than 100 countries in theworld today have adopted some kind of gender quota. We can see howcommon it is in the world today, and many countries have similar designs.
Usually when we talk about gender quotas, we talk about two things. One is theregulation type. It is the constitution or the electoral law that regulates the useof quotas to guarantee seats or candidate selection opportunities for women?
Or do political parties voluntarily adopt gender quotas without this being
required by the law? The interesting phenomenon is that if we look at countries
that are generally regarded as more women-friendly, more supportive ofgender equality, for example the Nordic Scandinavian countries, they do nothave laws that regulate gender quotas. Rather, their gender quotas emergedout of political competition, and from internal party rules. Progressive politicalparties adopted internal rules to increase women candidates and this practice
become a core political issue and a facet of intra-party political competition.
Specifically, the usual trend was that progressive or leftist parties adopted aparty quota first. Then conservative or right wing parties felt pressure to matchthat level of quota for their own internal rules. Progressive parties elevated thepercent of the quota and this was then matched by conservative parties. Thisback and forth dynamic led to the current situation in Nordic countries, forexample like Sweden, where the intra-party competition has led to all political

30

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

parties now presenting their list of candidates according to the famous Zebra
system, whereby men’s and women’s names appear on party lists inalternation.
For newly democratized, third wave democracies such as Latin America, thegender quota trend started in the 1990s. Many countries put the regulations
into formal laws that required all political parties to follow the gender quota
rules. This could be in the election law or the political party law, or any kind oflaw that regulates political parties or political competitions and elections. Many
Latin American countries chose to place the quota requirement in these specificlaws. Whether a party was progressive or conservative, whether they agreed ornot, all parties had to follow the law. Very few countries, and Taiwan is one ofthem, put the gender quotas in the constitution.
In addition to the type of regulation, there are also types of quotas. The first is
candidate selection, and it is directly related to the electoral system. For
example, in many European countries, especially Western European countries,
the electoral system is proportional representation. In other words, voters do
not vote for individuals, they vote for a list of the candidates nominated by thepolitical parties. Many Western European and Northern European countries,
their quota is for candidate selection, like how many women they put on the listof their nominations.
And the second quota type is called a reserved seat; these are the seats forelected people. For example within a council, if there are 100 seats of thecouncil then you reserve a certain quota for women, such as 5%, 10%, 20%. If
you are supposed to elect 100 political representatives, then you say we have
10% reserved seats for women, which basically ensures that 10 seats must be
occupied by women, have to be held by women.
The third type is called a gender-neutral quota. Gender-neutral quotas are notspecific to one gender; they are neutral. In other words, it can benefit men or
women, depending on who is the under-represented gender. So for example, if

31

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

we have a council of 100 people and a gender-neutral quota of 30% for eachsex, at least 30% of the seats must be for men and 30% of the seats must be
for women. The remaining 40% is left unregulated. Gender-neutral quotas are
not of benefit to women only, but rather they aim to ensure the representationof men and women. The purpose of a gender-neutral quota is not merely toprotect women’s rights, but rather to create gender balance in decision-making
institutions.
Taiwan currently has all three types of quotas. We have a constitutional
guarantee, a legal requirement, and the two largest parties voluntarily apply agender quota to their internal party candidate selection rules. We also have alltypes of quotas. We have voluntary candidate quotas implemented by the twolargest parties, we have reserved seats guaranteed in the constitution, andgender-neutral quotas that are widely applied to government commissions andgovernment committees. How did this happen?
The story of gender quotas in Taiwan has two parts. First, the legacy of the
Republic of China stems from its historical ties to China and the constitution of1946. In that constitution, it stipulated that for all elections, there should beseats reserved for women. It did not specify how many seats, however. When
the Republic of China government came to Taiwan in 1949 and started to ruleTaiwan, the Constitution was mostly suspended because it put Taiwan underauthoritarian rule. However, the practice of reserved seats (婦女保障名額) for
women was maintained in the elections.
The second part of the story stems from more recent history and reflects theinternational trend in quota adoption that emerged in the 1990s. First it beganwith changes to the internal rules adopted in 1996 by the more progressive
party in opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party. Further, the government
increased the level of reserved seats for women in local elections in the 1998
Local Government Act. After losing the election, the Nationalist Party decided toadopt a gender quotas. Sometimes losing an election can be good for a party’s
renewal and internal reform. After they lost the Presidential election in 2000,

32

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

they also adopted internal rules to reserve seats for women in their party’s
internal decision-making structures.
Finally, the constitutional reform was enacted in 2005. When the Republic ofChina government first came to Taiwan, they passed a series of laws regulating
different levels of elections. In those days, reserved seats were set at between
5% to 10% for different levels of elections. Under authoritarian rule, we had
local elections and partial national elections. Although Taiwan was underauthoritarian rule between the 1950s and the late 1980s, Taiwan still heldelections. In hindsight, those elections were quite important because it madepeople familiar with the function and process of electoral competition. Underauthoritarianism, even though the local elections were unfair, and although only
a portion of the seats were elected in national elections, in all cases, there were
nonetheless reserved seat for women set between 5% to 10%.
The democratization of Taiwan began in 1987 and the first importantdemocratic elections took place in 1992. For both national and local elections,
all elections since 1992 have ensured democratic competition. Through the
democratization debates, the first step undertaken in the 1900s by the
Democratic Progressive Party was to adopt gender-neutral quotas. Why? By theearly 1990s, the old reserved seats requirement had effectively become aceiling. In other words, the level of the quota was set too low (5%-10% seats)
and rather than serve as a “floor,” or a minimum number, it ended up
becoming a ceiling; major political parties were very reluctant to nominate
more women than the minimum quota required.
For example, if you only reserved five seats out of 100 for women, then thepolitical party would nominate five women to capture those reserved seats. Fora while there were brief debates in the early to mid-1990s among feminist
activists and feminist organizations as to whether or not to get rid of thereserved seats; they were not exactly helping women participate in politics andhad in fact become a hindrance. There was also a stigma that came with being
elected through the reserved seats. People would say, “Well you use reserved

33

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

seats so you allow less capable women to replace more capable men. That’s notgood for politics.”
Table 2. Reserved Seats and Gender Quotas in Taiwan
Year

Law andRegulation
C

1946

L

CS

〇

〇

〇

〇

1998

〇

〇

（〇）

Quota Requirement

Quota Level

There should be reservedseats for all levels ofelections.

5% to 10% inparliamentand various
local councils

DPP: In each district, forevery four nominations,each sex should have atleast one.

15% to 25%
in candidate
selection

Local Government Act: In
each district, for every fourelected seats, one should beheld by a woman.

15% to 25%
of seats inapplieddistricts inlocal councils(SNTV)

KMT: Women should benoless than 25% of the party
list in parliamentaryelections.
For each party, womenshould occupy no less than
50% of the seats won
through the part list in
parliamentary elections.

At least 25%
for the party
list (obsolete
after 2005)

GQ

〇

〇

〇

2000

RS

〇

1996

2005

P

Quota Type〇〇

15% of thetotal seats inparliament(Parallel)

C: Constitution; L: Law; P: Voluntary Party Adoption
CS: Candidate Selections: RS: Reserved Seats; GQ: Gender-Neutral Quotas
Source: Compiled by Author from the 1946 and 2005 Republic of China Constitution, the Local
Government Act, and the Nomination Rules of the Nationalist Party and Democratic Progressive Party

34

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

The turning point in these debates actually came from a very important talkgiven by a renowned American feminist activist, Jo Freeman. She visited
Taiwan in 1995 and gave a lecture on her experience as an activist in theAmerican feminist movement. During the question and answer session, somepeople in the audience informed her about the debates among Taiwan’s
feminist activists about the reserved seats for women. Jo Freeman shared an
important observation from her experience and from the research on womenand politics. She argued that there needed to be a critical mass of women
within an organization to change the direction or the culture of the organizationand to make it less patriarchal. She said the threshold was likely 20, 25% oreven more.
Among the audience at that time was the Director of the Women’s Development
Department of the Democratic Progressive Party. She picked up this agenda forchange as she herself had come from the feminist movement. She worked
closely with women’s organizations to push for internal reform of the
Democratic Progressive Party. Eventually in 1996, the Democratic Progressive
Party adopted a gender-neutral quota for candidate selection. At that time
Taiwan’s electoral system was similar to Japan’s electoral system. Academically
we called it a single non-transferable-vote, multi-member district system. That
mainly means within a district you have many people running for many seats.
Whoever gets the highest number of votes is elected. How many people will beelected from one district depends on the magnitude (often related to the sizeand population) of the district. At that time Taiwan’s electoral system was like alarge district with many people running for many seats.
In each district, major political parties will nominate more than one person,
because they want to win as many seats as possible. The DPP’s first reform wasfor candidate selection and the internal rules were changed to state, “In each
district, for every four nominations, each sex must have one nomination” In
Chinese we call it the “one-fourth gender quota”. In 1998, the DPP applied thisquota to the representatives of the party within the party’s assembly. In otherwords, there must be one man and one woman for every four of the party

35

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

representative positions. Interestingly, 2002 saw the first male beneficiary of
the gender-neutral quota. In one of the districts for county council elections,the DPP had nominated three women. As a result, the fourth nomination had to
be given to a man; the impact of the gender-neutral quota was immediate.
Soon thereafter, the KMT government adopted a quota in 1998 and during thistime, there was much discussion of the enactment of a new Local GovernmentAct. Women’s organizations mobilized around these parliamentary discussions
on the local government reform and they met with the female Minister of theInterior. Working in concert with women’s organizations, the Minister agreed toraise the quota for reserved seats in local elections to 25%. I had theopportunity to interview her when we sat on the Board of a Foundation
together. I asked why she agreed with the recommendation of women’sorganizations. In a very natural way, she answered, “Well that’s the trend, isn’tit?” This was a pretty good and simple answer.
In short, the reform to the Local Government Act was adopted without
opposition from any of the political parties. It states that in each district, forevery four elected seats, one should be held by a woman. We call them “onefourth reserve seats” because it’s about the seats reserved for women in each
district. After the KMT government’s efforts, the KMT party adopted a similar
party quota after it lost the presidential election in 2000; to show further
progress, they also elected their first ever female Vice Chairperson. They
applied the reserve seats for women throughout the party’s decision making
structures and the wording states that ‘Women should have no less than onefourth of the seats in the central standing committee.’ The central standing
committee is the KMT’s decision making body. The one fourth gender quotas
had become a standard practice in Taiwan by that time.
A final date of importance is the constitutional reform of the electoral system in
2005, which came into effect in 2008. Changing from SNTV to a mixed system
similar to that used in Japan, large districts with many seats were converted
into single member districts and a party list system. The main difference
between Taiwan and Japan is in the party list. Japan uses regional party lists,36

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

whereas for Taiwan, there is only one party list; the whole nation is the district
used to elect the proportional representation seats from party lists.
Local elections still use the old system so Taiwan currently has two different
electoral systems. A major implication of the 2005 constitutional reform was a
reduction in parliamentary seats from 225 to 113. Half of the seats were
eliminated, which is significant. The popular view was that politicians were
simply fighting all the time, and did not “deserve to have the salary paid bypeople.” Reducing the seats in half became a very popular agenda, to the pointthat large parties were unable to say they opposed this idea.
Specifically, under the new system, we have 73 single member districts, 34
seats in party list, and six reserved seats for aboriginal populations. While morethan 90% of Taiwanese can trace their ancestors back to China, we also haveaboriginal peoples comprising 3-4% of the population. For the women’sreserved seats, out of the 34 party list seats, 50% of the seats are reserved for
women. So the quota level actually is not very high because 50% out of 30% is
only 15%. The seat distribution between the district and the party list is also
uneven, similar to Japan. However, the immediate impact of the quota is clear.
From 2004, before the reform, to 2008 when the quota was applied, there wasa big jump from 21% to 30% women. In the 2016 elections, as mentioned
above, the number to 38.1%.
In Taiwan, for many years gender quotas have been widely applied to enhance
women’s political participation. Since 2004 all government committees andcommissions at the national level apply a gender quota in accordance with aresolution made by the Cabinet-level Gender Commission. Since 2004, allgovernment committees and commissions follow a one-third gender quotas,
which is even higher than the quota for elections. The resolution states, “Eachsex has no less than one-third of the seats of the committees or commissions.”
The one-third gender quota has been widely applied, so much that the
Sunflower Movement even adopted the practice on its own accord. During the2014 Sunflower Movement protest, college students and citizens occupied

37

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

Parliament for three weeks in protest of the service trade pact with China.
During the three weeks, this civil society-led decision-making body also
adopted a one-third gender quota.
The current agenda for Taiwanese women’s organizations and the feminist
movement is to push for a gender quota for corporate boards as well. In
addition to politics, economic decision making spaces are also at issue.
Emerging from Europe, this trend started in Norway in the mid-2000s with laws
requiring publicly listed companies to respect a gender quota for their boards of
directors. In 2012, Taiwan passed changes to the Gender Equality Policy
Framework, and stipulated that public enterprises and public endowments
funded with more than 50% public funds or state shares must comply with the
one-third gender quota for their boards. That is the current reform. I am very
familiar with this legislation as I helped draft that section of the policy
framework. The Taiwanese government often invite scholars to help draft apolicy framework, which is then presented to civil society organizations anddifferent government agencies. This was the latest reform on the KMTgovernment’s agenda.
From my own research on Taiwan, I have shown that increased reserved seats
actually enhances political competition. If we look at the numbers and empiricalresults of the local elections, we see that the more reserved seats available, thefewer women get elected through reserved seats. Reserved seats are less andless required to ensure women’s election. With the one-fourth reserved seatrule, more women ran for election, and as more women competed, thecompetition became stronger because these women were actually very
competitive. As the high-ranking winners of their districts, they did not need torely on the reserved seat to get elected. Furthermore, my research has shownthat even those who did get elected through the reserved seats had better or
equal qualifications to the men they beat (replaced) in the election. To assess
their qualifications, I compared their educational credentials, politicalexperience, experience of social participation and the finding was that most of
the women have equal or better qualifications than the men.

38

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

If we evaluate the acceptance of quotas, we know that gender-neutral quota
meet with less resistance than reserved seats that benefit only women. When
we talk to politicians and then when we lobby for gender quotas, and if we only
talked about women’s reserved seats, they had doubts. They were skepticaland would ask if Taiwanese women “need that kind of protection?” When we
present the idea of a gender-neutral quota, especially to male politicians, we
can say, “This is not just for women, this is for men too. You can get benefit
from that too.” They tended to be less resistant and it became convincing as a
strategy for fair competition.
Secondly, for political families that have very strong roots in local politics in
Taiwan, when the father retired from politics, he would ask his sons to run for
office. Since the number of reserved seats was increased, our preliminary
observations is that these local political families now allow their daughters totake over the political resources of the family, instead of their sons. This isparticularly true if their daughters are highly educated and are interested inpolitics. This really changes the profile of local politics.
A final evolution has been seen in the political culture. This is very importantbecause earlier research from the 1990s emphasized the role of gender andpolitical culture. At that time the percentage of women in the Taiwaneseparliament was less than 20%. The research showed male politicians tended tohave backroom dealings in places like saunas, salons, and in commercial sex
establishments. When female representatives went into the meeting chambers,
they came to realize that their male colleauges had probably drunk together theprevious night and had already discussed things. If there are substantial
numbers of women in politics, the men cannot circumvent the official
discussions with this kind of informal backroom deal-making. Even if they
discuss at the sauna, they still have to come back to the meeting rooms andconference tables to talk about these matters in official venues. This has thepolitical culture, particularly in recent years when more and more Taiwanesewomen hold important political positions. For example, if the party whip is a39

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

woman, then you have to come back to the floor or to the conference room tonegotiate with her, rather than in some salon while you are served by abeautiful female waitress.
To conclude, I wish to show these two pictures of the 2015 presidential
candidates from Taiwan’s two largest parties. The left hand side is Ms. Tsai,
Chairperson of the Democratic Progressive Party, and the President-elect. As you
can see from the cover of TIME Magazine, many people expected her to win. On
the right hand side is the presidential candidate for the Guomindang (KMT), thenationalist party. Ms. Hung Hsiu-chu was the deputy speaker of the house of
Taiwan’s parliament prior to the 2016 elections and she was also the Vice
Chairperson of the KMT. These two women are in positions of power. For Hung
Hsiu-chu of the right hand side to represent the KMT, a lot of people think it’s anaccident, but it is important to observe that a woman in Taiwan can advance thishigh by accident. In terms of national politics, it is not an accident that these two
women could be running for President. Taiwanese voters are very familiar withfemale candidates running for election from the local to the national level. If thisbecomes familiar and natural to have female faces at all levels of politicalcompetition, it will not be a surprise when they run for the highest office. I willstop here and I look forward to your questions and to discussing with you.

40

「東アジアにおけるジェンダーと政治」Booklet Series 1

Gender Quotas in Taiwan（IGS Project Series 20）

Profile: Chang-Ling Huang
Chang-Ling Huang is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the National
Taiwan University. Her research interests are quota politics and state feminism. She
studied gender quotas in politics and corporations and has used empirical data from
Taiwan to show most of the quota women in politics have equal or better qualifications
than the men they replaced. Huang is a joint fellow of the Radcliffe Institute and Yenching
Institute at Harvard University (2018-2019). Besides research and teaching, she hascommitted herself to Taiwan’s feminist movement and movement for transitional justice.
She served as a board member and president of the Awakening Foundation, the earliest
established feminist organization in post-war Taiwan, and of the Taiwan Association for
Truth and Reconciliation. Her publication appears in English as well as Chinese journals
including chapters on women’s political representation for ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF DEMOCRATIZATION IN EAST ASIA (Routledge, 2017) and THE PALGRAVEGLOBAL HANDBOOK OF WOMEN’S POLITICAL RIGHTS (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

41