By Kim Da-ye
Korea is in dire need of raising women’s participation in economic activities, considering the rate has gone down to the level seen 10 years ago against the gloomy outlook of a population decrease expected to start in 2008.
The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA) sounded an alarm in a recent report, calling for efforts to be made to come up with ways of addressing this issue.
The state-run research center cited a statistics, saying that women’s ratio of participation in economic activities or the portion of women engaged in economic activities against their whole population has decreased since 2006.
The decrease comes at a critical time when the nation is suffering from a dwindling birthrate, meaning that its population is forecast to diminish so the under-utilization of women in economic terms is seen as a key way of coping with it.
The report cited Korea Statistics to say that the portion of working women and peaked at 50.3 percent in 2006 but decreased to 50.2 percent in 2007 and 50 percent in 2008.Last year, it dipped below 50 to 49.2 percent.
The number of women with jobs decreased from 10.14 million in 2008 to 10.08 million in 2009. The portion of working men also dropped from 74.1 in 2006 to 73.1 percent in 2009 while the percentage of the working population dwindled down from 61.9 to 60.8 during the same period.
This trend also beats the expectation that more women will join the labor force as more of them receive higher education and employers have supposedly become female-friendly.
The report says that the diminishing ratio of women participating in economic activities is likely to be triggered by a structural problem in society that hampers women from returning to work after they get married, give births or raise children.
Statistics Korea’s 2009 figures show that 69 percent of women aged between 25 and 29 worked, compared to 51.9 percent of women in their early 30’s.
The statistics show that more women work in their late 30s _ a portion of working women aged between 40 and 44 was 65.4 percent.
Meanwhile, the report also points out Korea tops the list of the gender gaps in median earnings of full-time employees with men’s median earnings being 38 percent higher than women’s, followed by 33 percent of Japan. Third on the list was Germany where men earn 23 percent more than women do.
The average gender gap in median earnings of 21 Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development was 17.6 percent. The bottom on the list, or the least gender-discriminating country was Belgium where men earn over 9 percent more than their female counterparts.