The Strategic Thinking and Practice of Gender Mainstreaming Policy: Achieving the Goal by Implementing Family-Friendly Policy
Chiung-Ling Chang*
Abstract
The concept of gender mainstreaming, which caught much global attention recently, has prevailed in Taiwan through the government’s active promotion, permeating every level of government and policy-making.
This has opened up an era of gender rights over woman’s rights. To practice the gender equality policy and create the gender-friendly environment, this article sorts out the gender-related statistics, including those of the civil servants. It then conducts the gender analysis from gender statistics to compare Taiwan’s female labor participation rate, labor participation rates of both genders, marriage and birth rate, and the gender ratio of promotion/retirement rates of civil servants with those of other countries. From this, we come to realize the basic problems of low birth rate and aging population which have been affecting our country. Since we use gender mainstreaming and friendly family as references for policy thinking, we hope the government can use any policy tool to create and invent any policy that would share women’s burden of taking care of families in traditional society. To enable women to play a greater role in economic development, we need to strengthen the policies that encourage a strong family supporting system and provide incentives for managing human resources with greater gender awareness. Under the mainstream of equal rights, we hope the civil servants will take the initiative in strengthening gender awareness and then proceed to make good public policies that will realize gender justice.
Keywords: gender mainstreaming, gender statistics, family-friendly policy, strategic thinking, gender justice
* Professor & Director, Department of Maritime Policing, Taiwan Police College. email: linyifw@yahoo.com.tw.