The research, conducted by John Chung-En Liu and Genet Yan Hang Yu, builds on a well-established body of gender scholarship showing that climate governance is not a neutral technical exercise but a field structured by social inequalities in voice, authority, and participation. Rather than treating conferences as incidental gatherings, the authors argue that sustainability forums function as key arenas where climate expertise is publicly performed and legitimized. Who occupies the podium, in this view, is not a trivial matter of scheduling but a diagnostic indicator of how governance systems allocate visibility and public recognition.

To make that diagnosis, the team assembled an original dataset of 976 speaker appearances, coding each one by gender, speaking role, the type of organizing institution, and the thematic focus of the session. This granular approach allowed the researchers to move beyond a single headline statistic and ask where, precisely, women appear and where they vanish from view. The answer is sobering. Even in a year when sustainability programming proliferated across Taiwan, female representation never approached parity in any category the study examined.

The thematic breakdown is perhaps the most revealing. Women’s share of speakers fell to 15.9 percent in climate and energy transition sessions, the arenas where the most consequential decisions about power generation, industrial policy, and emissions pathways are framed and contested. By contrast, female visibility rose in sessions explicitly focused on equity and social justice, suggesting that women are disproportionately invited to speak about the social dimensions of sustainability rather than its technical and economic core. This pattern echoes a gendered division of expertise long documented in other policy fields, where women are cast as voices of care and community while men monopolize discussions of infrastructure, finance, and technology.

Organizer type mattered as well. Government-organized events showed higher female visibility than those convened by other actors, a finding that may reflect public-sector commitments to gender-balanced panels or formal diversity guidelines. Yet even this relative advantage remained limited, and the study emphasizes that women’s representation stayed constrained across every category of event. The implication is that no single institutional actor in Taiwan’s sustainability landscape has achieved anything close to equitable representation on its public stages.

Why does this matter beyond the conference hall? The authors argue that speaker composition offers a measurable window into the distribution of authority within what they call hybrid governance arenas, spaces that blend formal institutions with civil society, industry, and academia. Sustainability transformations are increasingly negotiated in such forums rather than in legislatures alone. If the people visibly framing problems and proposing solutions are overwhelmingly men, then the priorities, framings, and blind spots of male-dominated expertise risk being baked into policy agendas before any formal decision is made. Visibility, in this sense, is a precursor to power.

The study’s methodological contribution is its demonstration that gender-composition mapping can serve as a practical auditing tool. Conferences generate public records: agendas, speaker lists, session programs. By systematically coding these artifacts, researchers and advocates can track inclusivity over time and across institutions without waiting for slow-moving official statistics. The approach is portable well beyond Taiwan, offering civil society organizations and funders a concrete metric for holding conveners accountable and for assessing whether commitments to inclusive governance translate into actual podium time.

Taiwan presents a particularly instructive case. The island has positioned itself as a regional leader in sustainability policy, with ambitious renewable energy targets and an active ecosystem of NGOs, research institutes, and government programs. Its 2024 conference calendar, dense with forums on energy transition and climate adaptation, reflects genuine institutional energy around the issue. That this vibrancy coexists with such pronounced gender asymmetry suggests that the problem is not a scarcity of events or expertise but the persistent ways in which conveners imagine and recruit the face of authority.

The findings also resonate with international research on gender and climate governance. Global assessments have repeatedly found women underrepresented in climate negotiations, energy-sector leadership, and scientific panels on decarbonization, and scholarship has linked more diverse decision-making bodies to broader and more durable policy outcomes. The Taiwan study adds a fine-grained, event-level dataset to this literature, showing that the pattern holds not only in formal negotiation halls but in the semi-public forums where expertise is staged for professional audiences, media, and students.

What would change look like? The study stops short of prescribing interventions, but its diagnostic logic points toward obvious levers: conveners could set representation targets, track speaker demographics as routinely as they track attendance, and examine whether women are being channeled into equity-themed sessions while men dominate technical ones. As Taiwan and other economies race to restructure their energy systems, the composition of the panels debating that transition becomes a bellwether of whose futures are being imagined. With women speaking in fewer than one in five climate and energy sessions, the study suggests that Taiwan’s sustainability transformation is still, quite literally, being voiced mostly by men.

Subject of Research: Gender representation among speakers at sustainability conferences in Taiwan

Article Title: Who speaks for sustainability transformation: Gendered visibility at Taiwan’s sustainability forums

Article References: Liu, J. C.-E., & Yu, G. Y. H. (2026). Who speaks for sustainability transformation: Gendered visibility at Taiwan’s sustainability forums. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(9), e0000293. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000293

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000293

Keywords: gender equality, sustainability governance, climate conferences, Taiwan, energy transition, speaker representation, climate expertise, conference panels, inclusivity, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, gendered visibility, climate policy