As graduation season comes to a close, the yes123 online job bank at the end of last month surveyed 1,260 college graduates to gauge their experiences as they seek jobs, often for the first time. The results were shocking. It turns out that many graduates’ welcome into working life is a litany of harassment, starting at the hands of interviewers.
In the survey, 30.2 percent of respondents said they had been sexually harassed by an interviewer, either verbally or physically. It is not like they have had years to encounter a few “bad apples” — most of these jobseekers have only just started interviewing this year.
That is just the start of a lewd laundry list. Another 31.8 percent of respondents said they were asked if they had any “unmentionable diseases” or “experienced pain during their periods,” 27.3 percent said interviewers made inappropriate jokes, 25.2 percent said they were asked about their sexual orientation and 23.9 percent said they were asked about their measurements, height or weight.
As for physical intrusions, 21.8 percent said that interviewers had put their hands on their shoulders, 20.5 percent said interviewers had touched or tried to hold their hands, 18.4 percent said that interviewers caressed their backs and 9.4 percent said interviewers groped their buttocks.
By far the most common was invasive questioning, with 87.7 percent saying they were asked private questions, including 60.3 percent who were asked about their relationship status.
Despite the figures, to many, these results are not surprising. If this batch of graduates is facing such pervasive harassment, imagine the countless more before them who experienced all this and worse, setting dismal expectations as they began their foray into adulthood. The figures help paint a picture of the kind of normalized harassment only now seeing the light of day, helping to elucidate why #MeToo is necessary and why it took so long to gain ground.
Job interviews also provide a distilled case study of the power dynamics at play in so many harassment cases. The setup is classic: Someone with power and authority (the interviewer) has something (a job) that another with less authority (the interviewee) wants. Is the interviewee going to make a fuss when the interviewer brushes their knee or asks about their plans for marriage? Or are they more likely to shake it off as something they will just have to put up with to pay the rent and put food on the table? It seems a small indignity to bear for the benefits, but as these tableaus play out en masse, it creates hostile environments that often escalate into something worse.
As the government heightens incentives for people — particularly women — to return to the workforce, it is clear that throwing money at the problem is not enough. Overt harassment aside, these data also expose a less sinister, but more pervasive disregard for any semblance of work-life balance. When employers ask about a woman’s plan for marriage (and it is nearly always a woman), they are enforcing a false dichotomy between having a career and having a family, and forcing her to choose, even straight out of college. How could any young woman imagine having a healthy personal life when she is repeatedly told it would harm her career?
The implication behind employers’ probing questions is that any pursuit outside of work is an unacceptable distraction, justifying the unsustainable working hours and conditions that plague workplaces in Taiwan, and poison well-being along with productivity.
It might only be one survey, but its jarring figures add another irrefutable piece of evidence to what the champions of the #MeToo and labor movements have been saying all along.
Three in 10 interviewing graduates facing sexual harassment is no aberration — it is symptomatic of a rot that needs to be cut out at its source.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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