Social capital and feminist power: promoting gender mainstreaming in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Feminist researchers have used social movement concepts such as the “velvet triangle,” mobilizing structures, and political opportunity to explain why national governments and international organizations adopt gender mainstreaming. However, these theories are unable to explain patriarchy’s profound influence on bureaucrats or to propose strategies to reduce bureaucratic resistance. This study suggests that Putnam’s social capital theory allows us to see that, in the political process of gender mainstreaming, feminist activists need social relations to strengthen their mobilizing solidarity, potential allies, legitimacy, and power. We examined how and why the Taiwanese feminist activists who participated in women’s policy machineries from 2005 to 2009 successfully institutionalized gender mainstreaming throughout the central government, including the installation of individual gender equality committees in all ministries. We found that their success lay in their ability to utilize political opportunities, emotion work, and confrontational tactics to enhance their social capital. They also created and established important social capital with and among politicians and civil servants. Their experience shows that gender equality mechanisms that allow civil society groups to engage in decision-making processes and that provide regular opportunities for dialogue between feminists and state actors can improve gender mainstreaming implementation and reduce bureaucratic resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Social capital
• emotion work
• gender equality machinery
• femocrat
• women’s movements in Taiwan
• central government

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Shu-ling Hwang is a Professor in the Center for General Education at the National Defense Medical Center (Taiwan). She has a PhD in social welfare from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her recent research focuses on gender mainstreaming, state feminism, and femocrats. She has edited Gender Dimensions and Taiwanese Society (3rd edn, 2018) and Gender Mainstreaming: Taiwanese Experience and International Comparison (2017). Both books are in Chinese.

Wei-ting Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Institute for Gender Studies at Shih Hsin University. She received her PhD from the Department of Political Science at City University of New York. Her research areas are social movement, gender politics, and state–society relations.

Notes

1 True and Mintrom (2001) point out that the global diffusion of GM has been facilitated by the UN and the transnational feminist movement. Not being a member of the UN meant that Taiwan’s government was unaware of the UN’s GM policy. It was as late as 2002 that some women’s organizations, such as the Taiwanese Feminist Scholars Association (TFSA), learned at the international conference about the promotion of GM in many countries. In 2003, TFSA members on the CWRP requested that the government start compiling gender statistics, and in 2005 further demanded the implementation of GM throughout the administration. It is fair to say that the launch of GM in Taiwan was also a result of transnational networking among women’s movements.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (Grant Number NSC 100-2410-H-016-001).