By Byun Yang-gyu

Labor force participation is a vital factor in sustaining economic growth. Without the appropriate amount of labor input, an economy isn’t able to keep its current growth rate.

Korea, one of the fastest aging societies in the world, is becoming more concerned about maintaining a certain level and quality of labor input than ever before.

Boosting labor input either quantitatively or qualitatively can be achieved by enlarging population size or raising education levels.

However, it would take too long to raise the record low fertility rate to a satisfactory level in Korea.

It might even be impossible and inefficient to raise the world’s highest educational attainment to even higher levels.

Fortunately, there is another way. We can achieve the same result by activating more people, in other words, by bringing more people into the labor force.

Let’s take a look at the current situation in Korea. The male labor force participation rate of the prime working age group (25 to 54) in Korea was 90.3 percent in 2010. It was only 1.3 percentage points lower than the OECD average.

However, the situation becomes totally different when it comes to the female labor force participation rate. It was only 62.2 percent, 9.1 percentage points lower than the OECD average.

In other words, more than one million Korean women do not participate in economic activity compared to other OECD countries. Matters are even worse for highly educated women.

The average female workers with a high school diploma or less withdraw from the labor market when they get married, but rejoin in their late 30s or early 40s.

However, once female workers with a bachelor’s degree leave the labor market, they do not usually return.

From a macroeconomic point of view, this is an enormous waste of human capital.

What makes women withdraw from the labor market?

Childbearing has long been female members’ duty among Korean families due to Confucian mores.

A survey conducted by the Korean Bureau of Statistics in 2011 shows that even though 84.3 percent of adults support the economic activity of female members, only 50.6 percent agree that women should work without career interruption.

After a certain period of career interruption, it would be very costly for women to regain their previous economic status, and this makes many withdraw from the labor market.

Some aspects of the Korean labor market system also make it difficult for female workers to keep a work-life balance.

OECD statistics show that 72.2 percent of female Korean workers worked more than 40 hours a week in 2010.

This is drastically high compared to 6.5 percent in Denmark and 11.4 percent in the Netherlands.

Basically, what this statistic shows is that female workers are forced to choose either long working hours or not to work at all.

This rigidity of working hours also drives many female workers out of the labor market.

We should steadily absorb some traits of matriarchal society so that male and female members can share the burden of housework.

However, it might take a long time to change the Confucian values that have been with us a long time.

Fortunately, it would be much easier to absorb a flexible labor market system.

For example, a flexible working hour system in which workers set up their own schedule would allow more female employees into the labor market.

Providing more decent part-time jobs would also give female workers an incentive to remain in employment or start working again.

Another system we can think of is a personal working hour savings account. Under the system, workers may accumulate overtime hours so that they can spend the time when they need to strike a balance between work and home life.

By raising the female labor force participation rate to the OECD average, we could instantaneously see one million additional highly educated workers.

Just imagine the contribution that these one million workers would generate.

We should seriously think about how to absorb a flexible labor market system before it’s too late.