 Okay, I guess we're ready. Starting. Good morning. And today we are very lucky to welcome two special guests and unique leaders, Mr. Moriaki Kida and Ms. Audrey Tang. And we would like to hear their visions of the future for both Japan and the world. We will touch upon topics such as society, the diversity and inclusion, digital transformation, what has changed, what changes are yet to come, and what will perhaps be left for the same. So first of all, I would like to welcome Mr. Kida and introduce himself very briefly. So first Moriaki Kida or Mori is the CEO of EY Japan and has 22 years of experience in various industry sectors and has worked in several cities, including San Francisco, London, and of course, Tokyo. Mori received his bachelor's in the music and piano performance from University of California, Irvine and Masters of Science in Business Administration from San Francisco State University. He's a licensed certified public accountant in California. Mori is passionate about mentoring members in the LGBTQ community and driving career advancement opportunities for them, not only at EY, but also outside of their organization. So thank you Mori for joining us. Thank you for having me here. Would you have any words for the audience today? Just briefly to add, apart from practicing the piano, which really is the way I relax on the weekends, I currently live with my married husband, Geraint in Tokyo and also a Shiba Inu dog, which I believe in Taiwan have been used as a mascot or characters, but we have a second one now. Thank you for having me today. I'm very privileged to be here. All right, thank you Mori. Next, I would like to introduce Miss Audrey Tang. So Audrey Tang, well known as Taiwan's first digital minister, became the first transgender and youngest ever government minister at the age of 35. She has leaped into prominence in Japan for creating an app that combats coronavirus by showing face mask inventory levels at a glance. Recently, she has wowed Japan and the rest of the world with our leadership on the coronavirus crisis. Thank you very much for joining us, Audrey. Yeah, really happy to be here and live long and prosper everyone. Thank you very much. Would you like to add anything about yourself for the Japanese audience? Sure, so I would like to say that the mask availability map is the work of thousands of civic technologies and certainly not myself. All I did was to code a portal to showcase the civil society's work. In a sense, I'm just hollowing out the clay to make a pot, but what's in the pot is the civil technology spec. All right, great, thank you for joining us. So first of all, I would like to jump into our first topic and I would like to ask both of you, Audrey and Maury. So my first question, what progress do you think has been made in the Japanese society and also in the world regarding to minority groups such as women, LGBTQIA plus individuals, immigrants and others? So let's hear from Maury first. Sure, I think compared to 40 years ago when I left Japan, it's changed quite a bit and that is not just for women, but for like you mentioned, foreign born people. For example, I remember people being afraid of entering an elevator when it comes and a foreign person is in it. So they might be startled to enter the elevator back in 40 years ago. But things like the natural or first reactions have changed. Also, there's been a lot of changes related to disabled people. But I also would like to mention LGBTQ related movements, changes over the past 10 years in particular. As a young guy living in the United States and having my first job, I never considered returning back to Japan. I actually had a very deep talk with my father when I came out to him at the age of 16 when he was asking me to go back to Japan for the university as an Asian person that I would be more successful and have more opportunities with no racism if I worked and developed my professional career in Japan. But I had a chat about being gay. I cannot return back to Japan. I would have to close who I really am. And that's how I came out to my father. But here I am in Tokyo. And especially related to LGBTQ, there's been a lot of local governments that are starting to recognize partnerships for LGBT people providing public housing for example. And there are many NPO's that are educating younger people which really is my passion and what's really important. And so there's been quite a big difference over the past 30, 40 years in Japan and many fronts. All right, thank you. So as we heard, Mori's experience having difficulty may be coming out in certain locations of the world and the different readiness of the different worlds. Audrey, is there any part that you can relate and how is your kind of society around you changing as well? Yeah, I want to comment on people in wheelchairs or people who are differently abled either in body or in neurodiversity. Back when I was a child, when Taiwan was still under the martial law, when the society was all about either conformance or resistance, you don't see many people in wheelchairs outdoors on the street. And that was not because that Taiwan is so healthy that people are not in wheelchairs, is that the public infrastructure was not friendly to people in wheelchairs. There was no concept of universal design such so that they would refrain from coming to the street and so on. And so I think it really changed in past 30 years or so in Taiwan that we now consider not only wheelchairs, but also people with various different capabilities in body and in their neurodiversity to be first class citizens. And you see a lot of people in various different body conditions and mental conditions on the street in Taiwan, like nowadays is very usual. And I think this is a sign of a more inclusive society. And as for the intersectional nature of the feminism movement in Taiwan and LGBTQ plus movements, I think we really see its victory really on the marriage equality that was passed more than a year ago now because we legalized the bylaws that is to say the same rights and duties, but not the in-laws. So when the two same sex couples wed, they're wed as individuals, but their families do not wed. And this social innovation really prompted people of different generations and of different religions embraced this core concept of marriage equality. And nowadays I think we're seeing a surge of popularity and social approval. I think it's up more than 10% compared to when it was first legalized. Great, great. So yes, it's finally that these societies and countries are recognizing these importance of diversity and inclusion. But once again for the listeners today, would you like to express what is the importance of diversity and are there any specific benefits for kind of society's groups and organization to recognize these? Audrey? Sure. For example, you mentioned the mask availability map and it's actually a really good example. Back when we're starting to ration out mask, nowadays if you're an adult, you get to procure from nearby pharmacies and so on nine medical masks every two weeks. If you're a child, it's 10 every two weeks. Back then we were deciding between, do we do the real name based mass rationing based on the mobile payment system? For example, the easy card or visa, master card and so on, so that we can automatically ensure that there's no double spending going on or are we going to use the national health insurance card in the pharmacies? The first one, although we already have the system there, it doesn't take much to implement. It will only cover the people who are used to mobile payments as opposed to cash and that's around half of our society. And our epidemiologist tells us if only half the population have mask, we might as well not ration the mask at all because then it will not have any significant effect on counter coronavirus. So we chose to build new systems based on the national health insurance card which covers more than 99.99% of citizens and residents. And for migrant workers, for example, who often do not have a SIM card to their own name, they may be used prepaid card and so on. Nevertheless, they have a national health insurance card. So when we later on work with convenience stores, we make sure that they can use their national health card to insert into the kiosk to pre-order instead of standing in queues because many migrant workers and people who are very old like my grandma, 87 years old, do not like long queues for obvious reasons. And so because of that, they can pre-order and collect the next week. And after that, we have seen that people have accessed the system numbers in the more than 90% of population, thereby effectively reducing our value of this epidemic. So if we do not consult the migrant workers, the people who are elderly, people in wheelchairs and so on, when designing the system, the system will be just for a few people or up to 50% of people. And that would actually defeat its purpose. This is just a very simple example of talking to people who are closest to the suffering to make sure their public services take their ideas into account. So it's not just diversity, which is the diversity of stakeholders, but really inclusion, including their ideas in decision-making, that is the important part. That's wonderful to hear that Taiwan is so inclusive and all of the society members are really supporting that idea. So now I'd like to ask a question from Mori, who comes from more of a business background. And also I do understand that EY promotes the idea of diversity and inclusion. So how is it important for businesses to incorporate these ideas into their corporate culture and so forth? And could you give us some specific examples? Sure, I mean, I think it's very well known that it increases productivity. And you could read about all the statistics about the positive effects of diversity and inclusion, which both have to be there at the same time. But I would like to share, I think, my personal experience, which was that, as I mentioned, I came out at 16 and was quite active in the LGBT-plus group we had on campus in the university. But as I went to a job interview, I had to make a conscious decision to go back into the closet because I wanted to be competitive. And back in the mid-90s when I was looking for a job, it was, you heard about being gay or lesbian as being just calls for dismissal from companies. And so it was competitively disadvantageous if I came out in the process of job interviews. But as I went up the career ladder at the EY, I started to feel that while I feel technically confident, I was feeling more and more less confident or incompetent when leading teams because I just had to be very careful with my words or even fully include myself in conversations about talking family difficulties or disputes between team members, for example. And so I've had to first accept myself in the workplace that I should be my own self. And after having accepted myself, I actually felt like I was personally more included in the workplace, which led to more confidence and be able to not be too careful about my ideas or people trying to figure out, why is Mori thinking of this or why is he coming up with this idea? So personally, I really believe that from the experience that my personal acceptance and inclusion has really helped me be honest about myself. And also EY, I think I was lucky to have worked for a company that actually really puts respect to teaming, which lead to enthusiasm, courage to lead all these things that are actually in our value statement. And it's one of those things that I never really paid attention, but in going through this process of coming out at work, I really feel the significance of people being themselves. And I would like all of the people who are still closeted at EY, but also all of the companies to feel that they could be themselves and be more contributing to everyday at work. Thank you. Well, thank you very much for sharing your personal experiences. I'm gonna slightly shift over a topic as we already kind of have to the subject of sexuality. And I would also like to ask Audrey as a member of the LGBTQA community to share your personal experiences in maybe where you ever have thought that being a minority could be a handicap or not and how have you utilized this to break through or use this as a tool of change? When the earliest memory of me realizing that I'm in a minority group was when I was seven years old and when everybody else was writing calligraphy or pencil using their right hand, I was writing with my left hand. And teachers told me that I'm in this like 10% minority group who prefers to use left handedness. But at a time because we were writing horizontally from left to right, writing with the left hand necessarily means that you're kind of obscuring the words that you write already. And so my parents and the teachers at the time kind of convinced me that I can practice writing with my left hand as fine calligraphy too, which is right to left by the way. And so, but I need to practice also right handedness in this kind of sign of conformance, which wasn't easy. And so I only practiced handwriting using my right hand for one year. And then I switched to typing, never look back. And so my handwriting remains to the state terrible and I type very fast. But of course, you're talking about sexuality, but that I think is a microcosm. It is mostly about having to kind of stay closeted. That is to say to hold the pencil with my right hand as a learned habit and only starting writing with my left hand when I'm by myself and so on. Of course, after the lifting of the martial law, nobody care about handedness anymore. And if you want to type really fast, you have to type with both of your hands anyway. And so MB dexterity become a advantage really. And so having passed through two puberty's once when I was 14 years old, but I never really developed a high testosterone level and my natural testosterone level according to medical examiners is about the level of around 80 year old man. That is to say somewhere between female and male adolescents. And so I decided when I was 24 years old to enroll into female puberty taking hormones and so on. And that went on for a couple more years. And I think my personal experience teaches me that having gone through two puberty's although not very deeply in either makes this binary category in my mind disappear. That is to say I do not feel that there are half of the society different from me. Rather I share this intersectional experience with pretty much everybody. So I would contest this label of minority. It might be a minority of people who decide to go through two puberty's or to learn to write by both hands. But once you do it's actually maximally inclusive and actually empowers you to take all the sides. Great, great. So going through your life and coming out I think is a very important process for a lot of sexual minorities. Not everyone is comfortable doing that. But both of your cases you have proven to find confidence somewhere throughout your life to be able to do that and now show the world and lead the world through your kind of steps. But if you were to be the same person and if you were not, sorry, so I'm gonna repeat my question. So do you think you would be the same person if you were not part of a sexual minority? How would this change? Does it even matter how would that influence your right person as a person, right? Should I answer first? So let's ask Mori first. Oh yeah. Sure, I mean I actually first like to react to Audrey what you just mentioned about minority because sometimes when I share some of these stories about inclusion or diversity, in Japan there's this first emphasis on gender still. And now we're talking about people with disabilities or people of different nationalities or LGBT plus. But there's this force that tries to conform people not to be, I guess act similar to your peers or your neighbors or some in Japan. And whether you are male or straight or what you would normally call majority, I feel like everyone has some aspect that they are minority of. And so I do say that I want people to be able to not think of yourself as majority but minority of something and remember how it makes you feel or how you'd like to be supported on that or how you'd be able to share that with other people without stigma or discrimination. So I really reacted to what you just mentioned. Thank you. Yeah, it was a really good point on intersectionality which is taking the vulnerability of one category but extended as a empathy, I totally concur. So to Alex, to answer your question, there's things that I think I have gained and I have lost because of my sexuality. But I personally having grown up in the United States felt like I was a minority, being careful of using that word but minority in two major aspect. One was obviously being Asian and the other was after coming out that I was gay during the year era when HIV was not treatable and people were dying in the 80s. And I think what I really lost was a few of those years when as I was coming out I really felt like I belong to nowhere. I couldn't picture my future or I couldn't picture even being working period. And so there was a period of lost confidence and not feeling like part of society at one point. But also I think on the Asian side I was very, I never thought of myself as Asian or I never thought of myself as Japanese but when I moved to the United States at eight I was bullied for looking like I do, being different from my Western counterparts at the time. So I also went through similar experience on both of these fronts. But I also have actually feel very much that I gained a lot from this experience. And then that's what Audrey just mentioned about the ability to be empathetic and to seek what they're hurting. And I will be the first to admit that I have unconscious bias and I have to keep learning which our DNA leader continues to remind me of. But I feel like I've lost some friends because I came out but I also gained many friends and new family and I think it was a gift in a way that I experienced both of these times of big moments of feeling like a minority. Thank you very much. So Audrey, I have a question for you or maybe for both of you. So I understand that both of you have spent your lives somewhat in various parts of the world throughout your maybe childhood teens, young adults and so forth. But I'm very curious about how you think your environment and living in different parts of the world have influenced you to become the self that you are right now. And how would that be different? Let's say if you were restrained to just Taiwan or maybe just in Japan, would your maybe sexual orientation or your maybe identity as minorities in certain aspects be different or be the same? So Audrey, would you like to answer first? Sure, a lot of my thinking was influenced by the year that I spent in Germany at the border of France. It's a small town called Dutweiler in the Zachland region. And when I was there, I was around 11 years old but my classmates, because I study in the primary schools are one year is my junior. So they're all 10 years old but they are more mature than people that I have encountered in Taiwan who are like 15 or 16 years old. And so I was wondering at a time, why is it so that at the same biological age, the children in Germany can kind of keep a schedule by themselves and choose their own classes and have a lot of their positions articulated very well and being just like adults, just with a smaller height. And so I studied the reason why and it turns out that it's what we call the Pygmalion effect. If the adults expect children to behave like adults, the children raise to the expectation. And if the adults treat children as babies, they would also fulfill that expectation. So there does really changed my outlook on things instead of discriminating people on biological age. Instead, we should work with the values that they have and the social expectations of them that also led me to participate in the education reform. Finally, the new curriculum we rolled out last year that emphasizes lifelong learning and transcultural intergenerational learning. On the sexual orientation side, I think it's really interesting because I dropped out of junior high school when I was 15 years old with full blessing of the head of the school and my teachers. And the first thing I did after dropping out is to go to the Atayala Mountains because in Taiwan, nowadays we have more than 20 national languages, the majority of which are indigenous. And each indigenous nation have a very different culture. For example, the Taiwan indigenous nation, the first nation never made a matriarchical or patriarchal structure. For them, gender is kind of irrelevant like left-handedness when choosing leaders. And there are matriarchal indigenous nations such as the Amis and so on. And so it occurred to me that even within Taiwan, there are traditions that are thousands of years long and that have a different configuration, a different default when it comes to gender expression. There are indigenous nations with three genders or five genders and so on. So the diversity was there right in Taiwan. And so it brought me to understand more of our indigenous roots, which brought me all the way to New Zealand with the Maori people because it shares the same Austronesian culture and some parts of the language. Well, you know, if you have watched the Disney film Moana. And so the point here I'm making is that maybe just close to us in the same island, there are different cultures that you can learn to look at your own upbringing from their perspective and that really transforms radically how you view your own presets that you have taken for granted. So I have made transculturalism a priority of my politics starting from that experience when I was 15 years old. Wow, that's amazing. So it's obvious that you were seeing these cultural differences, not just sexuality but cultures, race, all this from a younger age. So Mori, how could you relate to this from your background and how do you think you would be different if you were, let's say, just restrained to Japan as a young adult? So I really like this question because, what if scenarios are quite different? So difficult because I'm already in this situation. It's hard to go back, but I like it because it makes me think a lot. And the first thing, whether it's right or not, I understand better what privilege means. And that word has a very different meaning to many people but if I had been brought up in Japan and grew up only in Japan, I probably wouldn't have understood what certain how some group of people do have advantage over another because of the social construct, which to me is what the word privilege means. Another aspect is that, as I mentioned earlier, having been bullied, my first good friend in school was also a immigrant that just arrived to the United States from Taiwan. And he and I could not speak English so we had no way of communicating other than Chinese characters. And he and I shared the same one Chinese character in our name. And also Doraemon, the cat robot that everybody knows. And so I remember finding my first good friend. And I also, right now, my two best friends, one is Korean, one is American born American. And this multicultural experience gave me curiosity for the rest of the world. And that's why my husband can tell you that anytime I have time to read, I'm reading about history and culture because I'm now curious and I'd like to learn how do people actually feel sadness, joy, all these emotions because we all feel the same joy but what makes people feel them, the examples and situations might be different. So I really like learning that. And also languages because languages are not only tools of communication, I think, but it also reflects the culture. And learning about how even Taiwanese, Chinese people write certain expressions versus mainland Chinese or even American Chinese can be different using the same Chinese characters. So I think these kind of things, I'm just very curious to learn about development. So overall it's learning about privilege and having really instilled the curiosity and empathy to learn about different things. Thank you for sharing your personal experiences. I think that was very inspiring but also shows the importance of kind of exposure and understanding yourself and how you could be different in certain parts of the world, being a majority minority and so forth. So thank you very much for sharing. So here we'd like to take a very short break to get some air through the room. So if we can take a five minute quick intermission and maybe two minutes, three minutes, then we'll get back to our talk session. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Audrey, can you hear? May I ask you a question about something I read which is related to English education? I don't think this is the formal part of the interview, but English for Taiwanese people. Sometimes I feel, we're trying to do that as well in our company here, EY Tokyo or Japan, but I feel sometimes I'm imposing my own ability to speak in English to our people, although it's quite necessary in business. How do you explain or what is your thinking behind the importance of English language? Yeah, I learned English very late in my life, maybe when I was 15 years old. And that's not because of business, but because I got into a game called Magic the Gathering. It's a collectible card game, and at the time it was not translated into Anji, so I had to learn English to play the game. And so my main suggestion would just be to find something that you're interested in that involves lots of English speakers. Later on I would join the free software movement. Of course, the main communication in that movement is in English. And so maybe it's easier if people learn, I don't know, scratch or JavaScript or math. And then enroll into a community where English is the default because after all, language is what you use to talk to other people and really it doesn't work without a critical mass of people. Nowadays, of course, you can simulate people with Duolingo or some other apps, but the same principles do apply, that it has to be in the flow of work, in the flow of daily life, rather than something that you dedicate like two hours a day to. I found that immersive learning, even though very shallow, that is to say not using a lot of vocabulary, eventually builds the sense of language better and easier. Do you personally speak more than English and Chinese? Well, I mean, my first language is Dai Yi, the Taiwanese Holog. So that's my grandma's language. And when I was in Germany, of course, I speak a little bit of German and also France because we're at a border, but Je ne parle pas français, now. So I think you acquire a language when there's a need to it, but I don't keep that language too much because there's machine translation for most of my business and work needs at the moment. So I think in English now and rely mostly on machine translation. Wow. Okay, thank you. All right, that was actually a really interesting topic about language and becoming, I think how Taiwan is pushing for bilingualism. So maybe I'll touch upon that topic a little bit later on so we can go deeper into it. So that was a rehearsal after all. But for both of you, Audrey and Maury, if you feel like you want to comment or ask each other questions, please feel free to jump in. I'll only speak up when I need to can and give you new topics to talk about. So getting back into this, I would like to move on to our third topic of the day. And we want to talk about love and family, right? So how are the ideas around concepts such as love and family changing around you? How do you feel about this concept? Do you feel change? Is it still not changing? I'll please share some of your experience. So let's start with Maury. Okay, so what's really positive in the recent years in Japan is that the surveys show that majority of Japanese people now support gay marriage or equal marriage, sorry. And for Taiwan, our managing partner in Taiwan, Andrew Fu has supported that the Taiwanese gay marriage or the equal marriage. And I think now it's coming to a point where I think the corporations in Japan could play a bigger role, not just relying on governments to, you know, government entities to support, although grassroots local movements in Japan has been increasing this partnership movement, which is not the same as equal marriage, but it is the first step. I think what I have heard here, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries, which also now have equal marriage, is this term, traditional family values or traditional family in Japanese, you know, they say dento tekina kazoku, for example, or what is natural? And I always question this word traditional. Because tradition is something we create over time, but it also changes over time. And so if you go back in Japanese history, just to talk about Japan, 300 years ago, the shape of love was very different or expression of love was very different. Or if you go back 50 or 60 years ago, pre-war, there were a lot of, early deaths where mothers or fathers would die at a young age. And so the mother or the father may remarry. So what we call as traditional family with two parents who are married forever until they die at an old age, that is not really tradition. So I really do question that. But I also would like to refer to certain books related to homosexuality in non-human beings because there are a lot of science books. There was a book called The Color of the Rainbow that I read about 15 years ago done by a research scientist on how homosexuality exists in different animals. So again, the word natural or unnatural is something that really needs to be considered. But so those things are kind of the first things I think about as we progress towards equal marriage in various countries. And I'm so proud Taiwan has equal marriage now. Great, great. So Audrey, what is your views and how has your environment been changing about the ideology of love and family? How do you think this is changing right now? Well, love is love. And I really do not think that there is a material difference between like, so when people ask me of my sexual orientation, my standard answer is that I'm sapiosexual. That is to say I love homo sapiens. And of course, I'm sure that all of us here are homo sapiens. And that is the standard answer that I give. And there's some truth in it. It means that when love happens between two individuals, it is not because of some categories or things like that. It is just a natural expression of human nature. On the other hand, family really is a social construct. And as I mentioned in the, sorry, let's do this again, right? So, but on the family on the other hand is a social construct. I really like how Mori traces back in a history to see that family is constructed in various different ways. And indeed in Taiwanese history, as I mentioned that on the immigrants of the Minnan, they have this idea of like blood oath brothers. And it's begun as a kind of social ceremony, but then that idea became just what we will now that they call homosexual couples. Not to mention the more than 16 different indigenous nations, each have their own very different ideas of families. And that is partly why when we legalize marriage equality, we took this idea of legalizing only the individual to individual parts, leaving the family to family parts to cultural interpretations. And that is the transcultural nature of things. And incidentally it also reduced the resistance from the part of the society that insists on this to people wedding forever, their families wed kinship. And so because they don't see as threatening as the redefining marriage idea or the proposal of marriage equality. So maybe that's also something that Japan can consider. Very interesting. So I'm very curious as we talk about the notion of the traditional family, right? But as both Japan and Taiwan is moving beyond and accepting this equal marriage, what would a new family look like? And what would be the roles of family B in society moving forward? What do you think, Maury? I don't know actually because it evolves so much and I cannot predict the future. But we are moving more from a bigger family to smaller families and almost individualism. Marriage might mean something completely different or even meaningless at some point in the future. So I can't tell. But there is also in most many people the need to be with someone or need to feel like they care for someone or to take the care of health or wellbeing of someone. There might be this innate nature. So it may not be defined by gender. It may not be defined by social expectation of age or anything as in the U.S. You know, it used to only be between the people of same races or something like that. So I think it's a commitment really to help one another or several people maybe together to raise a child together or something like that. So I'm actually excited about how the definition of what marriage will evolve in the next generation. Thank you. Henry, do you have any thoughts on this at all? I totally agree. I mean, I'm a Avid reader of Wittgenstein, the philosopher when I was young and Wittgenstein in his book Philosophical Investigations proposed this idea of family resemblance, meaning that one word, even though like family, it may mean very different things to people and we recognize family relationships when we see it but not necessarily identical or even sharing any common feature with our used term family in our own family. And so I would say that family, the word itself is going through this family resemblance part whereas the essentialism that is to say that the family is defined by some essential feature still exist in some part of our legal code. What we're trying to do nowadays is to relax those essential featureism and making sure that when people feel that they are in the family, we respect their idea of family. And that is I think what's important that is people in the family recognize it as a family and that's what family resemblance means in philosophy. Interesting. So as we make progress is about the open-mindedness of families and ideologies around that, it is still also true that a lot of sexual minorities face difficulties kind of opening up or maybe is limited by law in becoming married and so forth. But as members of society, how can we support these young members of societies who are facing these difficulties overcome these hurdles or what can we do as individuals to help these people? Audrey? Okay, we in the Taiwanese cabinet office, this building, which is called the Executive Yuan. So incidentally also EY, my email address is at EY.gov.tw, really supports people of various different gender orientation, gender and sexual orientation and physical expressions and body positivity and so on through what we call Gender Mainstreaming Process. This process has been going on in the Executive Yuan in the EY for more than 12 years now. And I think it's a really good example of how organizational innovation can lead to a real change in social impact. Basically, each major bill, each major program that runs for a while or more years need to pass through the Gender Equality Committee, which is by design one more seat in the civil society organization compared to the minister's seats. And so I think it's 18 civil society experts and 17 ministers and the committee reviews each and every proposal, spills and so on to find the gender impact that it may have negative or positive. And then we build a gender impact dashboard that continue to collect the important statistics even well after the program has run its course. And what this means is that we have evidence-based policymaking that can inform people and we have a very clear KPI. For example, nowadays in our parliament, there's more than 40% women and that we have, for example, we are newly constructed buildings by default like in my office, the social innovation lab, there's four bathrooms, the universal one, the gender neutral one, the female one and the male one and so on. And so these starts as small innovations but through the gender impact assessment and gender equality committees work, it permeates to all the organizational public servants even though they would say initially that they work in the minister of finance or whatever that has ostensibly nothing to do with gender equality, they will have to consult the gender equality committee on each and every bills and all the different programs. And that builds into our young public service, a progressive viewpoint that they work as public servants are there positively to encourage people to essentially come out and share and enjoy and bring their own personal experiences as their unique contribution to the workforce. And so I think some sort of this kind of exoskeletal gender impact dashboard and evaluation criteria as their organizational innovation I think is really important. That's great. I find it really amazing how the Taiwanese government is taking so much leadership to drive this new change. I think there's a lot that the Japanese government can also learn from Taiwan. But Mori, is there anything specific that really caught your attention that maybe the Japanese government or maybe Japanese society as a whole could learn from these actions? Well, everything that Audrey just talked about is something that we could learn. Because I think, again, there's a relatively specific focus on gender right now, but binary gender by the Japanese political parties. But the definition of gender is still binary and very specific. So I think your example of four different types of bathroom that shows a lot more flexibility in defining for gender. But in kind of reacting to what you just mentioned, Audrey, in a corporate world, it sometimes feels like we're always competing for a finite resource. And I read about the SDG circle that things are not necessarily polarized the way you have approached political movements using social media. But we always come back to this, we have limited resources. You're spending too much time on LGBT or you're spending too much time on disability issues or gender, so you need to do more of this and less of this. And it almost always seems like we're competing against each other where I feel like the intersexuality is where we could start with. What is common? But is there something, a tip that you could give even to the corporate world on how we should try to get away from a finite resource, zero sum game kind of discussion? I'm sorry that- Certainly, certainly. Yeah, I always talk to our social innovators in the social innovation lab that because we're giving out awards, the social innovation partnership award, not to particular organizations, but rather to unlikely partnerships. So building unlikely partnerships is really in the DNA of achieving the SDGs together in Taiwan. That necessarily means that the social innovators when they're talking to big corporations, instead of talking just to the CSR department, the department for social responsibility, which does have only a limited resource, they instead, I encourage them to talk to the business development department, which would reshape the brand of that particular organization thanks to the influx of new idea that comes out of the social innovations. I will use one example. Our central epidemic command center, which used to hold a live streamed press conference every day during the pandemic days. We're now post pandemic. So for more than three months, they have held this daily press conferences. And I always ensure that this broadcasted live press conference is not only translated into funny memes by a cute spokes dog that you refer to, but also that anyone who have any input from any part of society can just dial this toll-free number 1922 and share their social innovations with the CECC. And there are, for example, a young boy whose family called 1922 saying, my boy doesn't want to go to school because you ration mask and all we got was pink medical masks. And my boy doesn't want to wear pink medical mask because he said he will certainly be bullied in school if he wear a pink medical mask. Now, instead of saying that, oh, we have only finite resources, this is the mask that we have got. What if we give them a white or a cyan or a blue mask? We have limited supply of those masks. We cannot get every boy the color of the mask that they need. We instead just talk to the leadership and open government participation officer from the Minister of Health and Welfare who lives with that spokes dog, by the way, all he had to do is to take pictures of the dog to translate into a meme. He talked to the Minister of Health and Welfare saying, what if you all just start putting on pink medical mask the next time you come to the press conference? And they did. And so the participation officer convinced the leadership as a kind of business development with young boys and showing gender mainstreaming solidarity and they kept wearing pink medical mask for extended days and actually changed all their social media icons and things like that pink. And so the boy became, of course, the most hip boy in the class because only he had the mask that the heroes wear. And that is, I think, a really good example of business development, really reshaping your brand to talk to a new segment of society that used to feel alienated or not connected to you thanks to their own input. So that's just one illustration. Thank you. Okay, great. So I would like to slightly switch topics now, move beyond sexuality, but now talk about how the world is changing. And because of the Corona pandemic, a lot of us, especially everyone across the world, now works differently, provides value to the world in different ways. And I would like to hear from both of you how are working styles changing, not just in Japan, but all over the world? How do people create value? And how should we be changing? What kind of open mindset should we be having? So, Maury, would you like to take this? Sure. I feel that there has been enormous pressure created for certain different people or similar people depending on circumstances. For example, in Japan, women have always had to carry on more of the household work, which actually increased in the workload due to the gender stereotype of roles that women have to carry on. And or caring for the elderly, that again, I think the research already shows that women are carrying more load of caring for family members, not just children, but their elderly parents. I also do have heard in the LGBT community, for example, that the people are feeling even more isolated because they're not necessarily out at home where they may be living with their parents and they are unable to go to social settings where they were able to be themselves without worrying about themselves. So, there has been undue pressure created for some portion of people who also, I think, work at EY. And so, I think we need to continue to help and recognize that and try to distribute the pressure to all the different people. But also, I feel like I found, I've heard some strange things too, which I will share, but web conferences have actually created a more equal footing for many people. For example, in the past, in a meeting, if you did not speak up, you would never be seen or heard. But now, in a meeting, you see that somebody is participating visually just because you're in the meeting. And so, there are certain aspects that have brought up different people. And actually, as a partner, I can actually call on some people that a little bit more naturally or even text somebody to say, oh, can you speak about this next topic next? I will call on you. So, it creates a different kind of equality that we probably could not have achieved or attained in the past. So, I really would like to continue taking advantage of some of these things. The funny thing that I've heard is that Japanese companies have recently asked for a conference called Facility Company to see if the president and the vice president can appear bigger on the conference call and can stay stationary at the top of the screen where all the rest of the employees are smaller at the bottom of the screen. At least that, I find that quite funny but reflects the Japanese culture. But I think majority of the companies that I've spoken to is not asking for that. And we, of course, that EY is not asking for that. It actually is great. I feel that everybody's appearing the same size and have equal presence. So, yeah, those are the things that I have to say. Yeah, I have a funny story related to that. I first had my interview when it was confirmed that I would become digital minister in September 2016. And my first interview was given to people who want to interview me who are primary and secondary school students. And I was in Paris at the time and they were in Taiwan, in Taipei. And so instead of a web conference, we decided to use virtual reality. I did a 3D scan of myself and they also did their own avatar and we meet in the HTC Vive powered this virtual reality conference room. And so just before entering into the conference room, I scaled down my avatar. So I'm at the same height as the younger kids because I'm one meter and 80 centimeters high. I'm almost double the height to some of the younger kids. But once I shrink my avatar to the same height as they are, suddenly we find that we interact much more naturally and that they can just speak directly to me without looking up to me and so on. And so I think a lot of those physical acoustic and so on constraints is really changed by this web conferencing, including virtual reality. But we have to be of course intentional in designing the social interactions about that. I have another example similar in that positive outcome which is related to some of the LGBT activities we have had at EY. In the past, we've led LGBT out of countries that have no laws against LGBT. So for example, in Asia it will be Australia, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, not Singapore. But actually Singapore is one of those examples where or Malaysia where it has been very difficult for us to have LGBT related activities very widely. But we've been able to do Asia-Pacific LGBT meetings where we talk about participants we had from Taiwan, we had from Japan that shared experiences because it's virtual, that because you didn't need to physically fly somebody in. So there are certain opportunities that actually have been created because of this and there are certain things even without the pandemic we will definitely continue on. Definitely. So earlier I caught you guys talking a little bit about the importance of speaking English in this changing environment. But it is also true that people are becoming a little less mobile just right now because of the coronavirus but also connected more digitally using tools and so forth. And I would like to ask you a little bit about how you think globalization will be happening in this current world and how is it important to be able to speak English or be bilingual? Audrey, do you want to take this? Sure. I think in English, but English is not my first language. I learned English only when I was 15 years old when I played this card game Magic the Gathering. And so my first language is Taiwanese Holok or Dai Yi and then Mandarin of course and then German and then a little bit of French. And so I think having gone through those different languages and now thinking English, I think what's really important is that the more language you learn, the easier learning a new language becomes. The more culture that you acquaint yourself to, the easier it is to accept new cultures. So in a sense, language is not only about that particular language but each language connects you to more languages and more cultures. And I think in the age of globalization, what we're looking at is what we call globalism, right? You share your local language, your local culture using the devices invented by people of different cultures in different languages so that you see your own culture from a transcultural viewpoint and your culture also helps other culture to see themselves from a transcultural viewpoint. I think that is really helpful because thanks to the pandemic, we now understand we're all on the same spaceship called Earth and this is a way past time when tackling global issues such as climate change, this information crisis and things like that if we have this sense of transculturalism and a shared globe. So globalization is obviously happening slightly in a different way than we originally imagined but do you have any thoughts about how this will, how globalization will keep on going in this modern world? Yeah, I'm a strong believer that because of the internet that globalization will continue to accelerate rather than I think some pessimistic view is that we're becoming more nationalistic and we're becoming more inward or local centric. I think it will continue but on this topic of language, I had no way of reading a Facebook posting of a friend in Finland before but although crude, I could still understand now and read what my friend is posting. Also even in the English language, Americans now say cheers which were only said by British or I think Australian people. So I think the language really is also continuously changing and connecting people in different ways. So I think the globalization in language is an essential mix but I really liked what you said Audrey earlier about bringing fun or interest with learning languages. For example, I'm a horrible German speaker but I really liked reading about history from a German perspective of Japan. So right now I'm reading a German book on the early 1900s relationship between Germany and Japan and I'm trying to learn that because of the interest I could go through this tedious translation of the word. So your game experience or things that not just for the sake of learning a language but to learn something else using that language. Actually, I didn't really think of that as a good way to mix, bring fun into it just like you're bringing fun into politics. That's right, that's right. It extends even to artificial languages such as scratch or JavaScript or Python because you learn this language just not because you want to be a programmer but rather there's something that you would like the program to do and it's fun to just work on each other's works, remixes. And I think remixes is really powerful because it has a intrinsic social direction of development and that is nowadays like through Duolingo which is a lot of remixing communities, people voluntarily translating and so on in a way that is mediated by the interaction space. So Audrey, earlier you were mentioning your strong interest in the area of education and I also know that Taiwan is really pushing forward bilingual education and wants to make the nation a bilingual nation by 2030. Why is this so important and how would this impact the way we work moving forward? Yeah, so by bilingual, we do not necessarily mean Taiwanese Mandarin and English. It could be Amis in English, Hakka in English and so on. So they're native language and English. The importance here is two-fold. First is that thinking in English connects you to a lot of communities around the world that uses language as they lingua franca or rather anglica of that particular community. The programming community really is a really good example. And the second, it also makes people who are of different cultures find Taiwan more welcoming. If you come to Taiwan and only see the signage and so on in a local language, it kind of pushes people away. But nowadays, we hand out goat carts. You can go to Taiwan for travel or for tourism and suddenly decide that you really like Taiwan, maybe because we're a pandemic free now and then people would just apply for a goat cart because they are digital nomad. They can work anywhere. And so they just convert their tourist visa into a three-year stay that includes a work permit, residence permit and they can get a health insurance after six months. But they would only do this decision. It is commitment to live in Taiwan if Taiwan is friendly to them. And English, of course, is something that's seen as more inclusive than any local language, especially if they come from American or European or African backgrounds. And so that is the main point of the TaiwanGoatCart.com community. They have, I think, more than a hundred people now and each of them trying to get more people to stay in Taiwan. And they are also very much looking into our, not only digital, but any public services to make sure that even as simple as road signs and so on have the correct English on them so that it creates an inclusive environment for people with all coaches. I have an interesting reaction because I think one fear I have is that people who do speak English in the business community in Japan have more privilege than those who don't. And how can I continue to address the advantage that English-speaking business people in Japan have over those not have? And I think increasing literacy is an important aspect. But I also am for what you say about bilingualism because maybe Taiwan is not much of an issue because you have one of the highest freedom of speech, expression, levels of many places around the world even compared to Japan. But even reading about the pandemic in the Japanese press is quite limiting in terms of amount of information. Whereas if you extend your language just to English you now are able to read how Taiwanese English papers are describing about the Japan. So you now have an outside in look about who you are or who your identity is. And it actually makes you more humble and smaller and to understand yourself a little bit better. So I think what you talked about welcoming foreign people to Taiwan, even allowing people to communicate English when the other native language is different within Taiwan maybe that might be helpful. I also like the fact that it extends your view of yourself by looking from outside in using English as one of the languages. Yeah, definitely. And by the way, our three year of Goat Cards are you can apply it again after it expires. And I've heard many people who want to reapply or stay in Taiwan for five years take advantage of our dual citizenship offering. So they become also Taiwanese while retaining their original nationality. And so this is not just bilingualism but rather by nationality as we are referring to. And I think it really is a good way to, as I mentioned, a transcultural identity of the nation of the Republic citizens because then we are not defining ourselves on any particular culture but defining ourselves as an open innovation sandbox of sorts that would make this transculturalism work. Very, very interesting, very interesting. So I think both of you shared the idea of by being able to speak English, being bilingual, be bi-cultural, you have much more access to the world. You are able to relate to so many more people across the world. And I think this information, right? Being able to understand, gaining access to information is such an important factor. And Audrey, I also know that you are a very strong advocate for transparency and that is one of your core policies throughout everything. How is transparency so important? Why is it so important? And what can let's say corporations learn from the idea of transparency? How could it benefit them? Sure, I have to qualify that though. I mean transparency by making the state or work transparent to citizens. It does not mean making the citizens transparent to the state, which would be surveillance state. And so this one way transparency from the state to the citizens is basically an idea of making trust earned like trustworthiness. Instead of blindly trust the state or blindly trusting the national health insurance to raise the mask properly, anyone queuing in the line can check their own phone. And if you are a person with blindness, for example, there are also chatbots, voice assistants and so on, more than 100 ways for you to confirm that people queuing before you have indeed reduced the stock of the pharmacy by nine or 10 if they are a child. And the people who are queuing after you can also participatory account for your purchase. And so this makes this trust between social sector organizations much more natural to earn. This is the same idea of a distributed ledger making sure that accountants working in different jurisdictions and so on can come to a rough consensus much more quickly thanks to the transparency enabled by ledger technology. And we use these technologies not to change how the society works but rather to reaffirm that the society have a absolute freedom of speech, of assembly and so on to take those source materials that we publish anywhere and to make analysis, for example, on the over and under supply that eventually led to us working with 24 hour convenience stores or taking our transcripts and our interview video like this very one that I will publish on YouTube under Creative Commons and even sample them as hip hop rap songs by those monos in Japan. And these are all applications that I have no way of foreseeing but then it shows the value of real transparency in that we do not restrict the uses to the one that can be imagined by us beforehand but rather it allows all sort of creative workers to reinterpret our work in unanticipated ways and that's innovation for you. Okay, great. So we can definitely see that Taiwan is leading in terms of the idea of implementing transparency into the social sector but I have a question for Mori as one of the leaders of a company that engages in auditing services. I think transparency is a very important idea as well. What does transparency mean to you and why is it so important, Mori? Yeah, so from a corporate standpoint at EY there are two ways I kind of see this. One is in our services and then the other is how we exist as a company for our employees and our society. And for example, for the service side audit or assurance services companies are very concerned right now about what non-financial values that they can also communicate to the public, that the traditional financial statements which includes the balance sheet based on market value and P&L, the profit and loss statement based on just the periods activities is not enough, that there are certain intangibles that the company have. So EY has participated in a project called a long-term value project in the UK and we have a proposal on how companies can continue to disclose those non-financial or intangible values to the public. There are a lot of companies that give back to the employees or society not just from a, what do you call, societal giving kind of donation type of work but actually doing it because they believe in it and we try to figure out how in our services how companies can disclose that. Another is really about our own company and the transparency of what we do. And I think in the last few years we have continued to actually not only talk about what we do but why we do it and what struggles we are having. So in the past, I think traditional Japanese companies have always been this strong, we know what we're doing, trust us type of corporate culture but EY has this culture or purpose of building a better working world and we really believe that we should share some of the struggles, some of the difficult decisions that we're trying to make and soliciting feedback on what might be good in your view. So it's not a top-down but it's also bottom's approach as well. So that we don't, the stewards of the companies are everyone and not just the management. So I think the world is moving towards more of a collective individual movement rather than just top of the organization who have privileged making decisions to benefit the rest of the firm. So that's, I think, the change that we're starting to see. Very interesting. Yeah, I totally agree. We are perhaps seeing peak hierarchy that is to say adding more hierarchy will not actually change or improve our ways to solve structural social environmental issues. So even the most hierarchical organizations in Taiwan including the cabinet office and the ministries now have to work with hashtags. We now have participation offices such as the person who live with a spoke stock that I alluded to whose whole job is talking to hashtags. And this really is a new idea, right? Previously you have officers that talk to journalists but they know which journalists they're talking to. They have officers that talk to MPs but they know which parliamentarian they're talking to but a participation officer that talks to hashtags. Nobody knows who is behind those hashtags but yet you have to engage those hashtags including of course hashtag that demand accountability on social return of value demanding accountability on the social impact that we are having in environmental one too. Yeah. All right, so I'd love to keep on going. We're hearing some great ideas from the two leaders today but I would start like to wrapping up with one last question for both of you. So my last question is what is something that you would like to achieve by 2030 and how do you envision the world to be by then? So I'd like to ask Audrey first. Okay, by 2030 all the global goals are supposed to be met but I think my main focus of course is on goal 17. I'm even wearing the color of goal 17 with me today which is partnership for the goals. And the partnership to the goals if you look into the specific items it talks about three things that I think are very important not to people working in digital but rather people working anywhere. And they are 1718 which is enhancing availability of reliable data. 1717 encouraging effective partnerships and then 176 making sure that the innovations are open to be shared across sectors instead of only in silos and all those three different specific targets builds a new worldview. That is to say people who work in the economic sector the social sector in the environment and so on need to transform both digitally and sustainably into organizations that are not for profit but with purpose rather they need to be for purpose but with profit. And that is the main idea change that would predict that we will see by the year 2030. All right, great, thank you. So Maury, same question to you. What would you like to achieve by 2030 and how do you envision the world to be by then? I don't have something, I should have gone first having seen something so concrete from Audrey but my difficulty really was in my process of coming out as a gay man. And there still are suicides or bullying that happen in various parts of the world. So one of my personal goals is to address these and to create a more empathetic environment for those who are what we call minorities, not just LGBT but those who feel like there is no home to them in any society. And that seems like such a huge thing but personally I really like to work for a teenage those who are going through puberty through the university system so that they can have hope for the future. And as a corporation, I think this democratization decentralization of decision-making and to create less difference in either earnings or decision-making power between the top and the bottom. I think that's where I really would like to get to. And lastly, as a society, this is more of a dream than what's probably possible but Audrey, it's really inspiring to hear your view of Taiwan accepting different times of people from outside of Taiwan. And I really hope that we get to a point where there's a lot more borderless communication movement of people that there's less emphasis on your differences but your commonalities as you mentioned. So the intersectionality is something that I really would like to see. Great. All right, so today we were very lucky to have Audrey and Maury join us and to hear from these two leaders about how the world may change what they think about what's happening but also get inspired and to look forward to a positive future for us. So thank you very much for joining us today and let's hope for a much better future. Thank you very much. Thank you. And again, live long and prosper. All right. Thank you very much, Audrey. I wish to have spoken to you and all the time. Thank you. Thank you very much. Likewise. Thank you. Thank you.