Taiwan owns the biggest LGBTQ+ headlines in Asia: in 2019 it became the first place on the continent to legalise same-sex marriage, joint adoption followed in 2023, and workplace discrimination has been banned since 2007. Taipei Pride is the largest in Asia, regularly drawing well over 100,000 people. So why isn't the score higher? Fair Away scores this dimension from the Equaldex Equality Index (Taiwan isn't in ILGA's Europe-only index), which blends law with lived reality — and there the picture is more mixed: public opinion sits around the middle (51/100), there are still no hate-crime or housing protections, changing your legal gender generally requires surgery, and non-binary identities aren't legally recognised. The law leads; acceptance and some protections are still catching up. Hence the ~ and a mid-scale score, not the headline you might expect.

Taiwan is a vibrant multi-party democracy with free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, a free press and robust civil society — the EIU's 2024 Democracy Index ranks it 12th in the world and first in Asia, a 'full democracy'. Power has alternated genuinely between the Democratic Progressive Party and the Kuomintang, and press freedom is among the highest in the region. The complexity is geopolitical: Taiwan's sovereignty is disputed by the People's Republic of China, which shapes its exclusion from the UN and most international bodies — but does not diminish the reality of democratic self-government on the island.

Taiwan performs strongly on women's rights, and scoring it takes an extra step worth explaining. The best-known gender index, the WEF Global Gender Gap Index, leaves Taiwan out because it is not a member of the UN — a gap in the measurement that follows from Taiwan's diplomatic status rather than from anything about Taiwanese women. The two sources behind this number do cover it: the Georgetown WPS Index 2025, which measures lived conditions (8.5), and the World Bank's Women, Business and the Law 2026 legal-frameworks score (8.0) — averaged to 8.3.

That matches what the country looks like from the ground: high female educational attainment and labour-force participation, significant political representation (Tsai Ing-wen served as Taiwan's first female president, 2016–2024), and a solid legal framework including the 2022 amendments to the Gender Equality in Employment Act. On reproductive rights, abortion is legal on broad grounds up to 24 weeks, but married women generally still need spousal consent — a real limitation that neither index fully captures.

Taiwan has an independent judiciary, strong rule of law and property rights that compare favourably with developed democracies; courts operate independently of the executive and the island ranks highly on transparency and anti-corruption measures. It isn't listed in the WJP Rule of Law Index (which only covers UN member states), so this score is estimated from the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators and calibrated to the WJP scale — that's what the ~ marks. Freedom House consistently rates Taiwan 'Free', with high scores on civil liberties and political rights.

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and Taiwan is one of those cases.

The figure on our other country pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour, and that review covers the 131 countries which hold trade preferences with the United States. Taiwan is not one of them, so it is never assessed. Household surveys do measure child labour in some countries outside that system, but they are run in different years with different questions, so a number taken from one of them would not mean the same thing as the tiered assessment used elsewhere on this site. We would rather show nothing than a number that isn't comparable.