Thoughts On The Women's Federation's Institutional Reform During The Period Of The Society Transformation

It's considered that strengthening the WF (abbr. for Women's Federation) organizationally is the valid method to raise women's work efficiency under the current political system. This article thinks it's necessary to discuss the WF's systematic reform in the height of building up the mechanism of promoting gender equality and women's position, since the pure organizational construction could not answer systematically how to keep the WF's interests in accordance with the women's and how to satisfy the institutional demands of women's work during the period of society transformation. The current WF's core institutional design has the mixed characteristic of party, government and society. And the three characters block each other; therefore the WF's institution is in a low effect to fulfill the three obligations of women's interests'expression, women public affairs administration and governing social pillar. Without creation of the core institution, many methods that the WF took made low marginal output, sometimes even minus output. The core institution of WF should be reformed to get to the new institutional equilibrium for the society transformation. This article tries to divide the WF into three women's work organizations of different levels, which are the Party's women's work department, the government gender equality department and the Union of women NGOs. These three parts implement the function of party, government and society respectively, and together make the whole mechanism of women's work. Afterwards, a cost and benefit analysis about the WF's reform is made to prove the feasibility of the institutional change, and the reform is separated to two steps in order to lessen the risk. In the first step, government gender equality department is set up, and in the second step, the Union of women NGOs is independent of the Party. At last, the text arranges the institutional changing path mainly in a compulsive way, but with deferent speed in the two steps. The former is radical and the latter is gradual, while in each step, the institutional internal need should be developed.