Across East Asia, women have been making significant strides politically. In China, not so much.

A historic milestone has just been reached in Japan. For the first time since its founding, Sanae Takaichi has become the country’s first female prime minister. Takaichi’s rise signals a broader shift in attitudes toward women’s leadership that has been taking shape across East Asia in recent years.

In a region long defined by entrenched patriarchal norms, Taiwan began to break with that pattern earlier than many of its neighbors. South Korea is another notable outlier: Park Geun-hye’s election in 2012 made her the country’s first female president, even if her legacy is now overshadowed by her impeachment and imprisonment.

Taiwan’s experience with women in politics is not a recent development. As early as 1946, the Taiwanese constitution reserved a portion of elected seats for women, embedding representation into the very architecture of the political system. From there, it did not take long for women to enter what is still often described as a “man’s game.” At the dawn of the 21st century, Annette Lu became Taiwan’s first female vice president in 2000. That breakthrough was followed by an even more consequential one: in 2016, Tsai Ing-wen was elected as Taiwan’s first female president. She won reelection in 2020 and ultimately served eight years in office.

At one point, women held 41.59 percent of Taiwan’s elected seats, far above the global average. The contrast with China could hardly be starker. On the mainland, women occupied only about 26.5 percent of parliamentary seats in 2024. The disparity is even more pronounced at the pinnacle of power: no woman has ever been part of the Communist Party’s top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee.

President Xi Jinping likes to describe Taiwan as a “blood brother” of mainland China, a phrase that inadvertently underscores how deeply patriarchal the Chinese political imagination remains. It is almost impossible to picture him invoking a “blood sister” across the Taiwan Strait.

The more interesting question, however, is why Taiwanese women have achieved far greater political visibility and influence than their mainland counterparts. The answer lies in the divergent historical trajectories of China and Taiwan.

In China, there is a persistent belief that women should step back from the workforce after a certain age, often around 50 or 55. In politics, where careers tend to be long and advancement slow, this expectation limits how far women can climb.

By the time they have accumulated the experience needed for top roles, social norms may already be nudging them toward retirement. This kind of ageism sidelines women before their capabilities are fully recognized. There are exceptions, of course: former vice premier Liu Yandong and current vice foreign minister Hua Chunying are among the few women to have held senior positions. Yet their relatively low international profiles raise a pointed question about how “high” these roles truly are within the hierarchy of Chinese power.

There is a certain irony here. China’s 1954 constitution explicitly guarantees women equal political rights, and Mao Zedong famously proclaimed that women “hold up half the sky.” Those commitments and slogans have not translated into robust political empowerment. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party has emphasized women’s economic participation while neglecting their representation in the upper echelons of politics. The result is stark: while neighboring societies move forward on women’s political representation, China continues to lag.

Across the strait, Taiwan’s political evolution has been more favorable to women. Early on, feminist advocacy organizations such as the Awakening Foundation pushed for women’s rights and greater public participation. Combined with a quota system designed to guarantee a baseline of female representation, these efforts helped ensure that qualified women could win office on merit. In theory, it created a system where representation and meritocracy could reinforce each other rather than exist in tension.

Still, Taiwan’s progress is incomplete. As Taiwanese legislator Fan Yun has noted, women remain underrepresented at the local level, suggesting that the gains made in the national legislature have not fully filtered down to grassroots politics. Nor did former President Tsai Ing-wen complete her tenure without facing gendered attacks. She was relentlessly mocked for being unmarried and childless, an indication that even the highest office cannot shield women from deeply ingrained sexism.

Politics in East Asia remains, in many respects, a man’s game. Yet Taiwan has done more to open the political arena to women than China has for its own citizens. Japan now appears to be catching up, with Takaichi’s rise marking a potentially important shift. As for China, Xi Jinping will not hold power forever. The more urgent and revealing question is whether a woman will ever stand where he stands now—and what it would take to make that possible.