New Taipei City

History

New Taipei City Government established the Women’s Rights Committee in 2000, and city departments worked to promote women’s working rights. Since 2011, in response to the international gender mainstreaming trend, the gender mainstreaming tools were gradually developed. To promote gender equality policies, the Women’s Rights Committee was renamed the Gender Equality Committee in 2016, and the government’s first-level agencies established gender equality task forces to implement gender equality policies by integrating gender perspectives through various service programs or activities.

In 2017, gender equality task forces were established in district offices to gain a more in-depth understanding of gender equality among all walks of life, communities, and families. To enable gender equality policies to more closely align with the citizen’s lifestyles, the “Gender Equality and Good Lives” program has been promoted since 2019 as a continued effort to implement the concept of gender equality in daily life, in order to ensure equal development opportunities for different genders.

Policy

Since 2015, the “Gender Mainstreaming Implementation Project of Different Agencies of New Taipei City Government” and “New Taipei City Gender Equality Policy Guidelines” have been continually revised. The “Gender Equality Promotion Business Counseling Reward Project for Municipality, County, and City Governments by the Executive Yuan” and the “Executive Yuan Education Training and Evaluation Project of The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women”, as well as the implementation experiences of various departments and district offices were referenced.

Goal

  1. To strengthen the gender equality awareness of city government employees, and to incorporate gender equality perspectives into policies, programs, plans, budgets, and bills.
  2. To establish a healthy, high-quality living environment and turn New Taipei City into a happy city with full gender equality.

Key focus areas:

The New Taipei City Gender Equality Policy Guidelines are as follows:

  1. Social participation: Empower different genders and promote the participation of different genders in decision making.
  2. Employment, economy, and welfare: Promote the participation of different genders in employment, enhance the development of competencies of different genders, promote work–family balance, and establish gender-friendly workplaces.
  3. Population, marriage, and family: Implement gender-conscious population and family projects, consider diverse family patterns, and establish holistic family care mechanisms.
  4. Education, culture, and media: Implement gender equality education, establish cultural customs and ceremonies without gender discrimination, and promote the implementation of gender equality work through the media.
  5. Personal safety and city spaces: Actively prevent gender-based violence, improve the safety designs of public spaces, and ensure that mechanisms for the participation of different genders and diverse groups are in place.
  6. Health, medical treatment, and care: Promote gender-friendly medical and care environments, and eliminate the influence of gender role stereotypes on people’s physical and mental health.

Municipals sectors involved

The city government’s Gender Equality Committee involves a general mobilization of the whole city government and operates with a four-level meeting mechanism:

  1. Gender Equality Committee: The convener (chairperson of the committee) is the mayor, and the secretariat is the social welfare department. All committee members and related department members are invited to attend and coordinate important Key gender equality policies and programs.
  2. Preliminary meetings: A meeting is convened by the secretary-general who also concurrently serves as a member of the Gender Equality Committee, in order to coordinate Inter-department affairs and promote gender mainstreaming tools.
  3. Task forces: The agencies of the city government are divided into six major task forces according to the gender equality policies and guidelines, in order to discuss and promote inter-departmental gender equality projects.
  4. Gender equality task forces and gender equality working groups: The groups are assembled by the city government’s first-level agencies and district offices, respectively.