ed Glass ceiling

In the aftermath of Park Geun-hye’s election as the next president, there are mounting calls for more women to enter the workforce.

A case in point is a bill submitted by a group of lawmakers that would oblige state companies to increase the number of female executives to 30 percent within the next five years. If the bill is approved at the National Assembly, all public enterprises must raise the number of women in executive positions to 15 percent within three years and 30 percent within five.

The legislation will be a meaningful step in the right direction, given that efforts to break the glass ceiling in the public sector should spread rapidly to the private sector. At a time when the world’s lowest birthrate and the rapidly aging population have already become serious social problems, making the best use of a female workforce holds the key to determining the country’s competitiveness in the future.

However, the reality is dreadful. According to data from Alio, a public information portal, women account for only 9.1 percent of the total 2,993 executives employed in the nation’s 288 public institutions. More than half of the institutions surveyed had no women executives and only 16 organizations, or 5.6 percent of the total, had female chief executive officers.

This dismal state is even worse in the private sector with the percentage of female executives at the nation’s top 100 companies remaining at 1.48 percent in 2011. And the ratio of women in senior government posts is estimated at a meager 3.7 percent.

This is because many Korean women armed with advanced education don’t work outside of the home. The proportion of women who go to university soared from 31.9 percent in 1990 to 80.5 percent in 2010, the highest rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But over the same period, the economic activity rate of women rose from 49.9 percent to 54.5 percent, which put Korea third from the bottom in the OECD.

The glass ceiling for women in society will be broken naturally over time, given that an increasing number of women have been making huge strides in both public and private sectors. Nevertheless, a mandatory female quota system will be needed as a transition.

True, there is criticism that the 30 percent goal within five years is too ambitious, given the absolute shortage of women in the middle echelon qualified to gain promotion to executive posts. But the most important thing is to lay the groundwork ― now ― so that women can compete with men on an equal footing in the future.