Carina Rother: My recording has started. Shall we jump right into it? Do you have any questions beforehand?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. We’ve got at least half an hour.

Carina Rother: Fantastic. Today I represent a German feminist magazine Deine Korrespondentin, that’s the name. We report on different influential women, global leaders around the world. We are very excited to be able to do this portrait of you, minister Tang.

Carina Rother: We are from Germany, and I heard that you have a connection with Germany as well. You did that rice cooker video in fluent German. What’s your connection with Germany?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I stayed for a year in Germany in Dudweiler near Saarbrücken near the French border when I was 11 years old for a year. I attended to primary school and learned to ride a bicycle and things like that, while my dad was doing his PhD thesis in Saarland University.

Carina Rother: OK. That’s very interesting. Too bad we can’t do the interview in German today, but your English is perfect as well. My main interest obviously is in Taiwan’s digital strategy, especially your advocacy of open source and open data as a tool of improving policy. What is to you the power of open source? What is the specialty in Taiwan’s digital strategy?

Audrey Tang: Certainly, in Taiwan, we’ve got many decades of open source movement. Even before that name Open Source was there, we called it Free/Libre Software. The community is always ready to work with pro democracy activists and also struggle against authoritarian forces.

Audrey Tang: This tradition, I believe, is because having democratized around the same time that a personal computer was invented. The first presidential election is roughly in the same year as the popular use of the word Web, both in 1996.

Audrey Tang: Internet and democracy are the same thing in Taiwan, meaning that it not only have it in the same year, but we imagine democracy itself like something of a technology, a social technology, where people can participate and semi conduct a design.

Audrey Tang: You can always revision, and make the bit rate of democracy higher, not just voting, which is like three bits per person for every four years, but much higher using Internet technology.

Audrey Tang: Open source, open data, open innovation, open hardware, and so on, in Taiwan is part of this broad movement of democratization its original sense, not just cheaper and more accessible, but democratizing in the sense of everyone can partake in improving it.

Carina Rother: That’s fascinating. I’ve actually never heard that before, that it’s basically the same thing, democracy and open data. Safety of the Internet in Taiwan is a very important issue because Taiwan faces the challenge of the infodemic.

Carina Rother: Some misinformation being spread and malignant cyber attacks partially from China, from all around the world. What is your role or your vision for defending Taiwan against these challenges?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we work closely with so called white hat hackers. People who are professionals in cybersecurity and experts in breaking into systems, except that they will tell us how they did it so that we can be resilient and work better. Indeed, in a global DefCon CTF competition, the talent team consistently plays at one of the top teams there.

Audrey Tang: For example, as digital minister, when we roll out the software defined government service network, for example, the Sandstorm application that we roll out to all the Taiwanese public service, for the first half a year or so we open up only to white hat hackers.

Audrey Tang: They filed three CVEs and so on to help us harden this zero trust network. That will then enable individuals in the government service to innovate and invent new applications while knowing that defense is secure, that we have a depth of defense when containing the maligned intrusions and so on that will get alert long before that attackers gets into the actual system.

Audrey Tang: Maybe we are honey pot or something. A good relationship with the white hat community, I believe, also coincides with the spirit of open source and co creation that you just mentioned.

Carina Rother: Just a question here, the white hat hackers, they’re not government employees?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm. They are not, but we’re on very friendly terms. There is a grassroots community, the hackers in Taiwan, the Hitcom community that we regularly engage with. There is of course also a lot of startups by people in that community that are part of our course, cybersecurity industry.

Carina Rother: It sounds like Taiwan is particularly strong when it comes to IT specialists and the knowledge and from what I understand the Taiwanese government also encourages these solutions or initiatives. One example of these encouragement is the Presidential Hackathon. What is the plan behind the Presidential Hackathon or why is it important in your opinion?

Audrey Tang: The Presidential Hackathon does not offer cash price, but a system designed by the winning teams are promoted by the government just like the presidential promises.

Audrey Tang: For five teams each year, they receive this trophy and they are invited to take part in those government initiatives to further those systems from telehealth to net zero emissions movement and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Government assistance is also offered to participant to locate commercial applications for the winner system as well. This unites the three sectors together, the social sector with the civic activist and technologist, the public sector, the career public service and the private sector to work together to build what we call data coalitions.

Audrey Tang: We believe that only when cross sectoral partnership is built can we truly tackle societal problems.

Carina Rother: I’ve heard you talk about the people-public-private partnerships, correct?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Carina Rother: When I was looking through the press conferences of the Presidential Hackathon of the last few years, I noticed that the winning teams are often largely male or that there are a lot more male programmers or visionaries in this projects.

Carina Rother: I think Taiwan is obviously a strong country in terms of IT, in terms of digital engineers but from my understanding, there is large percentage of this experts are also male.

Carina Rother: I want to know what Taiwan is doing, what you as a digital minister are doing to encourage more women into these spaces and also, I want to ask about the project that you’re also advertising for girls in cybersecurity what that is.

Audrey Tang: Sure. We actually have a two times Presidential Hackathon champion right in our office, Mei-Chi Peng from the Ministry of Health and Welfare. From what I remember the Ministry of Health and Welfare is actually more women than men in their teams if I’m not mistaken.

Audrey Tang: There’s a discrepancy, I guess, according to the topics that’s chosen. If it’s health and welfare, if this is about environmentalism and things like that, the gender is quite balanced, but if you look at the teams that specialized in, say, public utilities like the water corporation to Taipower Corporation and so on, then there is some gender disparity.

Audrey Tang: This shows that in Taiwan’s STEM, science, technology, engineering and math, when we judge by the graduate gender racial differs quite largely, I would say, with other fields.

Audrey Tang: I think STEM we just hit one quarter of fresh graduate in PhDs are women and three quarters are men, but in other fields, the fields that I just mentioned, like public administration and so on, the gender is very well balanced so that really flex the topic in the fields where they came from.

Audrey Tang: Cyber security is one of the STEM subfields that suffers from this gender disparity. If we can improve women participation in cybersecurity, we very quickly double [laughs] the available white hat hackers in our community.

Audrey Tang: I think the leader of the Trend Micro, Taiwan’s top cybersecurity company of course is woman and she interviewed one of her younger employees also woman about being a woman and becoming more aware of this diverse perspective when designing the systems for anti intrusion and things like that, why a more diverse and inclusive team matters a lot when you’re working with truly complex system.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s made a lot of impact. I also participated myself, recorded a short clip that says the computer never asked about my gender [laughs] when I learned programming. This is having some effect.

Audrey Tang: The president herself is very much into this promotion and met with the first batch of the winners from the girls in cybersecurity movements. This is very well received by people in the white hat hacker community so we look forward to do that more.

Carina Rother: I’m very excited to hear that you’re so aware of the gender disparities at the STEM fields. I heard that you said the computer never asked your gender, or it never asked your age, or it never asked your ethnicity. That is a deep truth. The Internet is quite an equalizing space.

Carina Rother: At the same time, it is so important what you’re doing, like working towards encouraging women and also LGBT people to participate in digital democracy and to participate as a public figure in these fields. For us, as a feminist magazine, we’re obviously also interested in your view on gender and on your view as your role as a very public transgender woman in Taiwan society and Taiwan politics.

Carina Rother: I would quite like to know, for you, what your experience has been as a transgender person in Taiwan politics. Do you think it affects how the public receives your work?

Audrey Tang: I’ve never faced discrimination in the past five years working as the digital minister. I believe that is partly because president Tsai Ing-wen [laughs] is also a woman. Unlike many other Asian politicians, she became our president by her merit, not because she belongs to a political family, that is to say as someone’s daughter or someone’s wife, but earned it through her own merit.

Audrey Tang: With her presidency comes this idea of valuing people’s merits and their core values, not their types, their roles, their genders, and things like that, which then directly led to the Judicial Yuan interpretation that enabled marriage equality along with many other things, right?

Audrey Tang: This is part of this wave that is brought by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen’s presidency. Now we’re also helped by the gender mainstreaming work that the public service has been doing for the past 14 or so years where all the major decisions, indeed all the law drafts and all the major budget items must pass through this gender equal committees review, which holds veto power to the budget and the new laws.

Audrey Tang: Even the Ministry of Finance and so on, like traditionally not that related to gender issues must be made into gender sensitive public servants simply because otherwise they wouldn’t get their job done, right? This is also very helpful and this led also because we have a quite balanced parliament, the most balanced in Asia, I believe more than 40 percent women parliamentarians.

Audrey Tang: That’s created a very supportive environment when I come out as transgender. People are like, “Yeah, we learned that in our gender mainstreaming classes. This is part of their gender sensitivity.” I feel very blessed working in this government.

Carina Rother: That is good to hear. I don’t know if the next question is too personal for you. Feel free to say that, but I’m very interested in your view on gender identity. I’ve often heard you describe yourself as Homo sapiens first and foremost.

Carina Rother: I’ve heard the term postgender as something that I don’t know if you claim it for yourself. My interpretation of your statements was that you maybe even think that gender is somewhat of a limiting concept.

Audrey Tang: No, I think gender is fine. What I mean is gender describes to me a set of shared experiences. I had my first puberty when I was 12 or 13. I had my second puberty when I was 25 or so. No matter which puberty you went through, [laughs] there’s something of our lived experience in common that we can talk about.

Audrey Tang: To me, this gender means some ideas around those experiences that we can share, but I wouldn’t say that I went through one puberty so I’d become a man, and now went through a second puberty so I become a woman as if that this is a delineating time, before which I’m not quite myself after which I’m my true self. I wouldn’t say that.

Audrey Tang: I believe these single choice labels actually excludes the possibility of building common experiences. For example, our Minister of Health and Welfare, Chen Shih-chung, our commander of the Central Epidemic Command Center, probably identifies as a man. I never asked him, but [laughs] OK, he probably does.

Audrey Tang: Still, when a young boy called the 1922 a toll free counter pandemic line saying that “You’re rationing now pink mask. I don’t want to wear it to school. All the boys in my class wear navy blue,” the administration just wore pink and all the other male officers in the CECC press conference all wear pink for quite a while last year.

Audrey Tang: They can also become more transgender, more fluid, but if they say, “Oh, I identify just as a man and as a manly man,” then maybe they wouldn’t do that. These exclusionary labels, if they limit people from having new experience and building new shared experience, and then it could be detrimental, but I’m fine with gender describing common experiences.

Carina Rother: Thank you so much for that very honest and very in depth answer. Because we still have a little bit of time, can I ask one more question?

Audrey Tang: Go ahead.

Carina Rother: You talked about integrating cross generational needs and experiences into your policy. You explained how you asked your grandma and your grandma’s friends for their needs when it came down to programming and the app that helped them get access to face masks. I’m curious about this idea of cross generational communication and how that inspires policy for you.

Audrey Tang: Well, it’s a very simple idea of nothing about us without us, right? For the affected stakeholders, we need to actually ask their lived experience.

Audrey Tang: Recently, I also asked my grandma, right before I attended a CECC meeting, to talk about vaccination options for people above 65 years old when the time comes for them to get their second dose. There’s some municipalities saying, “They should all register on the common 1922 platform.”

Audrey Tang: There are some municipalities that says, “No. The local county leaders, the local district leaders, should just assign…Allocate a time and place for everyone who lives in the same borough to go to that place.” Where there’s retired people, it’s more convenient for them to not jump through the hoops to go to a website, and so on.

Audrey Tang: We have six municipalities and each mayor have strong opinions of this particular regard. We need you to resolve these tensions.

Audrey Tang: I asked my grandma who went through this borough based assignment process herself. Working with her younger companion, she also went through the second, the registering to a nearby clinic. I asked her, “How would you choose and why would you choose that answer one?”

Audrey Tang: She came up with this elaborate idea of people who preferred to go to a nearby clinic. I should go to online and respect her choice. For people who didn’t register, that is to say if they’re younger, their children help them file their willingness online. They ultimately do not want to go to a nearby clinic. Then, they should go to the assignment by the peer leader and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is a two step process. She justified it by saying she also asked her older friends as well, people in their 90s. She said that, “If they did not show up for their first dose…” We were also talking about allocating some resource to vaccinate people at home, actually going to their door in door. So she said, “Maybe you should reserve that only for people who already received the first dose because for people who did not show up for first dose, it’s quite likely that they want to reserve that for younger people because they seldom go outdoors.”

Audrey Tang: For things like that, I wouldn’t be able to ask the 90 year olds. I’m not in a group with them. I didn’t attend the church [laughs] that my grandma attends. If I just call these 90 year old people, they probably wouldn’t tell me something very useful, as I don’t have the common topics, the common experiences that my grandma very easily can access to.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that intergeneration solidarity means that each person has this range of comfort zone of other people lived experiences, that they are quite willing to share.

Audrey Tang: Without this kind of ambassadors and religious that connects between the lived experiences across generations, then it’s actually not easy to do a focused group or a sonography or things like that if you go outside of your comfort zone into some place that you simply do not have the share vocabulary.

Audrey Tang: This is a necessity if we want to design the inclusive programs with the principle of nothing about us, without us.

Carina Rother: You speaking to your grandma about policy decisions seems to give a whole new meaning to your idea of listening at scale. It’s like you listen at scale offline and online. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Carina Rother: Minister Audrey Tang, thank you so much for answering my questions. I don’t know if there is anything that you want to add or you want to ask me?

Audrey Tang: No. I think these are really good questions, very well prepared.

Audrey Tang: Live long and prosper.

Carina Rother: Thank you very much. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: OK. Let’s make a transcript. I think this will help both of our work. Actually, it’s my first time talking about my grandma’s influence in making decisions. I might want to reuse that in the future.

Carina Rother: Yes. Let’s make it. Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Bye.

Carina Rother: Bye bye. I will be in touch. Bye.