South Korea’s first feminist party has vowed to push for equal pay and tougher laws to end widespread voyeurism against women as it gears up to contest an upcoming election. Due to be launched on March 8 – International Women’s Day – the Women’s Party has signed up over 8,000 members, founded as a growing feminism movement has started to emerge in the socially conservative Asian nation. It is hoping to win four of 300 parliamentary seats up for grabs in an April 15 poll although political analysts said it would be a challenge for the fledgling party. “Women’s [issues] have been marginalized by other parties and we want to put them at the forefront,” Kim Eun-ju, a veteran women’s rights activist and one of the party’s founders, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation ahead of the launch. “We want to highlight the seriousness of discrimination, violence and inequality against women.”…

In efforts to tap into the full potential of women entrepreneurs, Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) is set to organize for the first time a trade promotion delegation exclusively composed of female entrepreneurs this year. The delegation is scheduled to visit Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia as part of TAITRA’s efforts to help women better explore foreign markets and gain a greater role in Taiwan’s foreign trade in line with the government’s policy and a World Trade Organization (WTO) declaration, TAITRA said. The three countries are covered by the government’s New Southbound Policy, which has been broached by the administration of President Tsai Ing-wen after she assumed office in May 2016, to boost two-way trade and investment with countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia as well as Australia and New Zealand. The reason why these countries were selected is simply because there have been relatively few promotions targeting them,…