Democratic Progressive Party starts gender mainstreaming

This article was written by June Tsai and published by the Taiwan Journal on March 24, 2006. According to this article, the governing Democratic Progressive Part (DPP) in Taiwan recently announced that it had designated 2006 as the party's Year of Gender Mainstreaming. The party has put together a consultative team to help it implement its gender-mainstreaming policy. The team's 23 experts have backgrounds in law, politics, public health and economics, and will ensure that DPP's party functions observe strict gender equility.

At the 50th annual meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women held at the United Nations in New York in March 2006, one important theme was equal participation of women and men in decision-making processes at all levels. In order to achieve this goal, the U.N. commission put an emphasis on the role of political parties, rather than governments. According to the commission, political parties should institute a nomination quota for women, encourage women to participate more in public affairs, and recruit women to run in local-level elections.

The DPP aims to take these three steps and to provide women with access to all levels of political life. The party claims that it has played an active role in both the women's movement in Taiwan and the nation's democratization. One example is Peng Wan-ru, an outspoken women's rights activist who joined the DPP in 1990 and took up the position of the party's director of women's affairs. She was a vocal critic of the government's gender policy and a driving force in pushing for Taiwan's constitutional protection for a 1-4 female nomination ratio.

Peng was raped and murdered in 1996. To this day, the police have failed to find the criminal responsible for her death. Peng's death served as a catalyst that led to the establishment of a committee across various government ministries to promote women's rights. Gender issues, rather than women's issues, also became the DPP's focus. The party established its Department of Women's Development in 1996. Since then, it has been working with various non-governmental women's groups in order to bring all kinds of gender issues to the public's attention.

Gender mainstreaming is a globally accepted strategy to promote gender equality. It was first established at the fourth Conference on Women held by the United Nations in Beijing in 1995. The term means that decision-making must incorporate gender perspectives and pay attention to the goal of gender equality.