The Emergence of the Gender Equal Employment Bill

Abstract

In Taiwan, increasing numbers of women workers wanted to continue working after marriage or childbirth but many were forced to quit jobs due to company policies. Many firms believed that women workers with family responsibilities were troublesome and had less aspiration to work hard, so they forced their female employees to quit once they were married or pregnant. Although the Constitution and the Labour Standards Law have established women’s equal rights to work and the latter has also ruled that firms must follow the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work,’ current legislation in Taiwan is still insufficient to protect women’s employment rights.¹ The social circumstances and market orders have changed over time. As equal rights between men and women in the workplace have become a complicated issue in industrial society, they cannot be regulated by only two or three articles whose main purposes are not to eliminate gender discrimination in the workplace. Therefore, women’s groups have looked forward to having a comprehensive law to protect women’s equal rights in the labour market.