State-run firms snub women

By Kim Tong-hyung

Government officials love to speechify about the importance of raising the low employment rate of women, which they claim would help mitigate the fall in labor input from an aging workforce.

However, the paucity of female executives in public organizations and companies proves that authorities aren’t putting their money where their mouths are.

According to data from the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, a mere 9 percent of 2,993 executive-level employees at the country’s 288 public companies and quasi-government organizations are women, dramatically lower than the political target of 30 percent. And only 5.6 percent of these organizations are headed by women.

While there were 15 workplaces that met the 30 percent mark in the gender balance of executives, accounting for 5.2 percent of the total, most of them were small-sized firms where the number of executive-level positions didn’t exceed two.

Myeongdong and Chongdong Theater director Choi Jung-im, Korea Red Cross President Ryu Jung-keun and Arirang International Broadcasting Foundation Sohn Ji-ae belong to the list of 16 female leaders of public firms and institutions.

Chung Mong-joon, Hyundai scion and lawmaker of the governing Saenuri Party, is pushing a bill that requires public workplaces to reduce their share of male employees below 85 percent within the next three years and 70 percent within the next five. Should the bill pass the National Assembly, public companies and organizations will have to scramble.

While ``glass ceiling” is a universal term that describes the barriers which prevent more women reaching the top echelons of the corporate world, for many working women in Korea who experience blatant and often unbreakable obstruction, the glass appears to be substituted by something even more resistant such as concrete.

There are only a handful of female chief executive officers (CEOs) among the top Korean companies and half of them are daughters of the parent group’s chairman.

According to a study last year by the Samsung Economic Research Institute (SERI), a think tank financed by, yes, the same business group that speculates whether married women will want to have kids, found that less than 1 percent of Korean firms that hire more than 1,000 employees have female CEOs.

Only 17 percent of the companies’ mid-level managers were women, while the proportion of female executives was just over 6 percent. By comparison, 3.6 percent of the global firms that make Fortune magazine’s Fortune 500 list were led by female CEOs, a six-fold increase from 0.6 percent in 2000.