Korea needs to do more to close gender gap

Freda Miriklis, president of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women (BPW International) / Courtesy of BPW International

By Kwon Ji-youn

Korea is behind international standards when it comes to women in the workplace, meaning there is certainly room for improvement, said Freda Miriklis, president of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women (BPW International).

“It’s true that the Asia-Pacific region is really lacking, and it is behind international standards (when it comes to gender),” she told The Korea Times on Tuesday.

“Take the gender pay gap issue ― the disparity between what a man and woman earns just because of their gender ranges from 30 percent to 90 percent,” she said. “There is work to be done, but nothing is impossible.”

Miriklis attended the 8th Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity held on Jeju Island on May 29-31. She gave a keynote speech to share her views on how nations can achieve their full economic potential by promoting gender equality. Over 3,000 experts, officials and politicians from about 40 countries took part in the forum.

As the head of one of the world’s most influential women’s networks, Miriklis is showing a lot of interest in Korea because the country will host the BPW International Congress 2014, and also since the nation elected its first female president.

But despite all efforts here to narrow the gender gap, only 0.7 percent of Korean CEOs are women, Miriklis pointed out.

“It’s very low … it’s one of the lowest,” she said. “But that is the case for most other countries around the world.”

Asked what the cause was for such differences in gender equity and acknowledgement, Miriklis noted that Korea’s economy is far too conservative.

However, she stressed that as long as other countries and key economies lead the transition toward workforces consisting of equality between the genders, results will follow.

She was not at all hesitant when voicing her opinions about Korea’s future.

“We need a roadmap and a plan of action,” she said. “We need to set ourselves clear benchmarks in terms of what we can achieve and more realistic milestones.”

The most effective plan of action would be for Korea to adapt as much as it can, and when hit by a wall, to come up with an innovative model or system that will work for Korea’s culture, which is, as Miriklis put it, “quite different.”

She provided an example.

“Australia’s stock exchange has made gender diversity a governance issue,” Mirkilis pointed out. “It has really made the CEO and the board think about how many women they have in their management, or at their board level.”

On an economic level, she emphasized the important role of women as a consumer base.

“Women we know today are making up 80 percent of consumer decisions,” she continued. “If you have three or more women at the board level, we start to see profitability in companies improve and we start to see return on investment and return on equity.”

“It’s not the right thing to do anymore; it’s the smart thing to do,” she said.