The Museum of World Religions and the Red Room Association yesterday held a salon-style panel in New Taipei City featuring discussions on the achievements of women ahead of International Women’s Day on Tuesday.
The “Changing Climates” panel invited seven Taiwanese and international speakers living in Taiwan to speak on the topics “Soft skills for today’s world” and “Changing narratives in the workplace.”
Attended by about 70 people, the event opened with a ritual for Devi, a Hindu goddess of consciousness who Indian artist Vandana Mengane said signifies feminine energy.
After the ritual, Malabika Das, a trauma-informed integrative community social worker and wellness specialist from the US said if women want men to be supportive of their empowerment, men should be provided with opportunities to develop and enhance their soft skills.
“Provide infrastructure and a space for men to be able to feel their feelings, to be in touch with themselves, to be able to do all the things that apparently women do with soft skills,” Das said.
Syeda Zehra, a Pakistani doctoral student at National Taiwan University, said she felt women were not respected enough in the field of chemistry.
She said one of the reasons was that fewer women choose to study graduate-level chemistry than men.
This causes challenges for female chemistry students, because discussions and debates always go in favor of male students, she said.
After the panel, the celebrations continued with special guest performances, including traditional Indian dancing and music, at Red Room Rendezvous in Taipei.
International Women’s Day was first held as a commemoration of a demonstration on March 8, 1917, by female textile workers in Russia’s Petrograd — now St Petersburg — which marked the beginning of Russia’s February Revolution.
Largely confined to communist countries for most of its existence, International Women’s Day has become a worldwide celebration of the cultural, political and socioeconomic achievements of women after it was recognized by the UN in 1977.
Police have issued warnings against traveling to Cambodia or Thailand when others have paid for the travel fare in light of increasing cases of teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people being tricked into traveling to these countries and then being held for ransom. Recounting their ordeal, one victim on Monday said she was asked by a friend to visit Thailand and help set up a bank account there, for which they would be paid NT$70,000 to NT$100,000 (US$2,136 to US$3,051). The victim said she had not found it strange that her friend was not coming along on the trip, adding that when she
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to