More women attaining leadership positions in Taiwan: surveys

Progress on gender equality is accelerating in Taiwan as more women take supervisory and executive positions in the private sector and posts as public representatives in politics, according to two reports released on Tuesday.

There were 374,000 elected officials, business leaders and managers among all people employed in Taiwan in 2020, and 114,000, or 30.5 percent of them, were women, according to Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) statistics.

That was 10 percentage points higher than the 20.5 percent seen in 2010 and the first time the number surpassed the 30 percent barrier, the agency said in its latest national statistics report.

But the total number of women in top positions remained well short of the 260,000 men who were elected officials, business leaders and managers in 2020, the report found.

The DGBAS survey also indicated that Taiwan’s 30.5 percent ratio of women in supervisor, manager, and public representative positions was lower than the 44.6 percent in the United States, but higher than the 15.7 percent in South Korea and 13.3 percent in Japan.

Also on Tuesday, China Credit Information Service (CRIF), a Taipei-based credit rating services company, issued a report on Taiwan’s top 100 business groups, in which it found that 89.3 percent of the core decision-making figures in the top 100 enterprises in 2021 were men.

Of the 845 core decision makers in those companies, 755 were men, the report said, but it noted that a growing number of listed business groups and public banks have women as their company’s chairperson.

Each year, CRIF selects 100 core enterprise figures, and the number of women selected to that list this year rose to 12, up from four in 2017, according to the report.

It expected the ratio to exceed 15 percent by 2029.

Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel