Korea’s search for 'gender discrimination against men'

Korea faces a serious social problem. President Lee Jae Myung has repeatedly urged officials to get to the bottom of the issue and take action. A ministerial overhaul followed, resulting in the creation of a new office to address the matter. A series of meetings with young voters was held to discuss possible solutions.

The issue in question is what Lee has often described as “reverse discrimination against men” — an ironic policy focus in a country with one of the worst records on women’s rights in the industrialized world and one that is consistently criticized for making insufficient efforts to address gender inequality.

Since taking office in May, Lee has repeatedly highlighted the issue in public remarks, widely interpreted as de facto policy guidance for officials.

“There is serious structural sexism against women in society in general. But it is suspected that the opposite is happening in certain fields,” Lee said in a cabinet meeting in October. A month earlier, he remarked that, “men can also be discriminated against in certain areas.”

“There are certain fields where men feel discriminated against, but no one is officially trying to discuss the issue,” Lee also said in June, adding, “young men are also disadvantaged in competition with young women, so they must feel a sense of discrimination.”

As examples, Lee pointed in May to state-run exams for public servants, schoolteachers and legal professionals — fields in which women have often outperformed men — arguing that “[the interests of] men should also be protected.”

Korea’s gender equality ministry — initially created to tackle chronic discrimination against women — thus should devote more attention to studying and mitigating alleged “discrimination against men,” he also said in June.

Soon afterwards, the ministry established a new Gender Equity Planning Division tasked with such a mission and designated it as the primary unit within the Gender Equality Policy Bureau, granting it authority to coordinate policy and allocate resources across the bureau’s divisions. Previously, the role had been held by a division responsible for advancing women’s rights.

Yet even Gender Equality Minister Won Min-kyong was unable to provide concrete examples when a lawmaker recently asked her to specify instances of reverse discrimination against men.

No wonder, considering Korea’s dire record on women’s status, a reality that belies its reputation as an economic, technological and pop-culture powerhouse.

Korea has recorded the largest gender pay gap among OECD member countries every year for three decades. As of 2023, the gap stands at 29.3 percent in Korea, nearly three times the OECD average of 11 percent.

The country also consistently ranked as the worst place to be a working woman in the industrialized world for nearly a decade in The Economist’s Glass Ceiling Index, only narrowly overtaken by Turkey in 2024.

Discrimination against women is rife in Korea’s male-dominated workplaces, beginning at recruitment. For years, headlines have detailed companies that secretly slashed women applicants’ test and interview scores to ensure male hires.

Women who make it through hiring face what the Economist magazine once called “a ceiling made of bulletproof glass.” Women occupy just 6.5 percent of executive positions in Korea’s top 100 firms — far below the OECD average of about 33 percent.

Sure, women had made significant inroads into the elite civil services. But the success was born partly out of necessity.

Public-sector jobs are among the few spaces where women can compete on relatively level ground — where hiring processes leave less room for manipulation and where age, marriage, or childbirth are less likely to end careers. For many women, pursuing public service has been a desperate survival strategy.

In that sense, women’s strong performance in civil service exams is not evidence of structural discrimination against men, as Lee suggested, but a consequence of pervasive sexism elsewhere. So, the solution lies not in questioning the few relatively fair arenas that allow women to excel, but in reforming discriminatory practices across the private sector (also, even in these supposedly female-dominated fields, men continue to occupy most senior positions).

In the series of government-hosted forums on “reverse discrimination,” male participants often complained of the difficulty of taking paternity leave at work, or the burden of mandatory military service for men. Yet these grievances, too, stem from patriarchal norms that consider caregiving as women’s work and portray women as too weak or unfit to serve.

In the end, what is framed as discrimination against men is largely the byproduct of a system that remains deeply unequal for women. If policymakers genuinely wish to address men’s grievances, the answer is not to sideline efforts towards gender equality, but to deepen them.

Dismantling workplace discrimination against women and rigid gender roles would ease pressures on both genders — and ultimately resolve many of the issues now being mislabeled as “reverse discrimination.”

Jung Ha-won is a journalist and the author of "Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide.”