By Lee Kyung-min
The Environment and Labor Committee of the National Assembly is to deliberate on introducing a law which provides extra credit for female job applicants with children.
This law comes as a way to deal with increasing discontinuance of female workforce as a result of pregnancies.
According to Statistics Korea, up until June 2011, 986,600 married women aged between 15-54 left work because of pregnancy, which accounts for almost 20 percent of all married working moms.
Saenuri Party lawmaker Shin Eui-jin suggested the law on “gender equality on employment for maintaining both work and family” be passed last December, and the law is to now going through an evaluation by both the Democratic United Party and Saenuri lawmakers.
If a mom had stopped working because of pregnancy and raising the child but wishes to come back to work, 2 percentage points of the total score will be added, Shin explained.
However, some measures will be added to balance out the criticism, she added.
The women who will benefit from the new law will be limited in number of up to 20 percent of those recruited.
If an applicant gets accepted with the extra credit, the period of pregnancy and raising children won’t be recognized as work experience and thus not reflected in the salary.
The committee wrote in the report, “Fact checking on the whole process of leaving work for family planning might be very subjective.
"Also this might be grounds for discrimination against the lower-class women whose proof of work is hard to establish,” it added.