Future Depends on Maximizing Efficiency of Female Labor
Koreans usually call the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family by its shortened and literally-translated title: the ministry of women. When the Kim Dae-jung administration introduced this ministry in 2001, many Korean men asked, ``Isn't this 'reverse discrimination?''' The latest OECD report on the wage gap between male and female workers among its major member nations shows it wasn't ― and still isn't.
In the period between 2003 and 2006, Korean women received 38 percent less wages than men, which marked the widest gap among the 21 countries surveyed, more than doubling their average disparity of 17.6 percent. Korea's economic size has jumped to low-teen levels in the global ranking in the past decade, but it was mainly for only half of the nation's population.
Of course, the wage difference by gender is still a global phenomenon, in which most industrial countries show a disparity of 10-20 percent, but it is a totally different story when the gap approaches 40 percent as it does here.
The yawning gap itself is in turn due to the extreme imbalance in the ``quality of employment.'' In other words, men usually take regular, high-income and professional jobs, while women toil in temporary, low-income and non-professional positions. Women account for less than 2 percent of the executives in the nation's four largest family-controlled conglomerates of Samsung, Hyundai Automotive, LG and SK groups. One can find few ― if any ― female managers in large commercial banks.
Little wonder the Swiss-based World Economic Forum put Korea at 115th place out of 134 countries in its gender equality ranking last year or virtually last with the exception of some Middle East and African countries. The main culprit behind this dismal situation is the nation's poor marks in women's political and economic participation and the few opportunities available to them, while it won relatively high points in education and health/life span categories.
To sum up, Korean women, who are educated almost equally to men, are as healthy as and even live longer than their male counterparts, are given too few opportunities to contribute their energy and knowledge to national development, in what is one of the most glaring wastes of human resources in the world.
The cause of this pre-modern gender discrimination is rooted in both historical and biological backgrounds. This strongly male-dominated society still regards giving birth and raising children as exclusively a woman's job, however high they go up the social accomplishment ladder, requiring them to interrupt their careers midway, or sacrifice everything for their professions.
A recent statistic on the daily life of Koreans also indicates among married couples, wives spend 215 minutes a day on household chores on average, more than five times higher than husbands, at 42 minutes a day. And this childcare-related interruption of careers and forced dedication to housekeeping leads to an overall discrimination in occupational categories and job assignments within workplaces. The falling birthrate and rising age for first marriages are its natural consequences.
The Lee Myung-bak administration has sought a global prestige befitting the nation's economic power. Upgrading women's status not just serves humankind's universal cause of seeking equal human rights but also ensures the nation's economic survival in the post-industrial world.
Korea's future lies in how it makes the most of its female workforce by taking the abolition of gender discrimination as an urgent, national task.
