By Kim Tong-hyung
While Korea is on no one’s list of the world’s best places to live, life here remains particularly harder for women, who continue to see their prospects diminish in workplaces and income tables, official figures show.
Despite being generations ahead in terms of finishing school, an alarming number of 30-something women are dropping out of the country’s workforce, with the lack of family-friendly policies being blamed, judging by Statistics Korea’s annual report on social trends.
Families depending on women income-earners were significantly more likely to be in poverty, confirming that the country doesn’t have much to show for its efforts to reduce the gender pay gap.
Other revelations from the report include an increasing demand for childcare options among employed parents, rise of micro-families, workers’ growing concerns over life after retirement and the public’s insatiable appetite for social media.
Numbers show that Korea, at least, is doing a better job in integrating women into the workforce than 20 years ago. However, encouraging them to work beyond their mid-30s has become a difficult challenge as the pressure of working long hours and the lack of maternity support begin to take their toll.
Economic activity among women aged between 25 and 29 was measured at 69.8 percent in 2010, but the figure dropped sharply to 54.6 percent for women aged between 30 and 34.
Interestingly, economic activity among women in their early 30s (49.5 percent) was higher than those in their mid-to-late 20s (42.6 percent) in 1990.
``The numbers reflect the increasing number of women gaining access to higher education, which has many of them waiting longer than ever for marriage and childbirth,’’ said Yoon Yeon-ok, an official from the research team on social trends.
Korea had around 10.2 million economically active women at the end of 2010, but only 49.4 percent of them were employed. The figure represented an improvement of just 0.2 points from the preceding year and failed to recover the 50 percent-plus levels between 2005 and 2008.
In comparison, about 73 percent of economically active men were employed in 2010. Women accounted for 50.3 percent of the country’s population of 47.99 million that year.
While there are dramatically more families depending on men than women as breadwinners, numbers point toward a gender balance between income-earners among poor families.
Of families living on less than 50 percent of the median income in 2010, more than 48 percent of them relied on women income-earners. In comparison, less than 21 percent of households above the poverty line relied on women income-earners.
Women are struggling to catch up on pay. On average, a female employee earned less than 70 percent of what their male counterparts took home in 2010. And the employment rate for women was padded by casual and precarious jobs more to a degree than that of men.
The efforts to balance work and family life have given the childcare sector a jolt. While the country’s number of kindergartens remained essentially the same in the 10 years to 2010, the number of daycare centers and preschools doubled from 19,276 to 38,021 during the period, driven by demand among employed parents.
The increasing number of parents who create micro-families with two or fewer children continues to reshape the traditional ideas of family life and influence the way people get ready for life after retirement.
About 65.7 percent of workers surveyed by the statistics agency last year said they are pursuing specific plans to prepare for life after retirement, much higher than the 32.9 percent who gave the same answer in 1998. The changing attitudes are attributable to a much lesser number of people expecting to be supported by their children after retirement.
Only 29 percent of the respondents said they wanted to live with their children after retiring, down from 53 percent in 2002. About 34 percent of those over 65 were living alone in 2010, up from 20 percent in 1990.
The report showed that people who received higher education tend to be more anxious about life after retirement. Of those with college degrees, 80.5 percent said that they are preparing for elderly life. The comparable ratios for those who graduated from high school and middle school stood at 64 percent and 60.3 percent, respectively.
Meanwhile, social networking services like Facebook (www.facebook.com) and Twitter (www.twitter.com) are changing the way people communicate and obtain information.
About one out of 10 Koreans were using Facebook or Twitter as of last year, a trend that has accelerated by the explosion of mobile Internet devices like smartphones and touch-screen tablets.
Users of Twitter, which allows them to broadcast their status instantly through short messages, increased nine-fold over a year and a half, from 632,000 in June 2010 to 5.44 million at the end of December last year. Facebook users were tallied at 5.35 million as of last year.
More than 76 percent of Internet users between the ages 12 and 49 were either on Facebook or Twitter. About 81.6 percent of Twitter users said they were using the service for exchanging information, underlining Twitter’s DNA as a media tool. More than 83 percent of Facebook users, in comparison, were looking to expand their social circles.