Korea still falls far behind in gender equality

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By Kim Jae-heun

A 31-year-old female office worker surnamed Kim has been working at one of the country's top electronics companies for six years and is still perplexed at how her company treats men and women differently.

"I've seen many senior female staff leave the company. So far, I only met one female executive and she is unmarried," Kim told The Korea Times.

"The company prefers male workers to female ones because women go on maternity leave after having a child. Executives think it creates a vacuum at work. Also, the company wants men in high positions because women are often slighted when they meet executives from other companies. This is absolute nonsense in the 21st century," Kim said.

This situation is still very common here and pushes the level of Korean women's participation in the economy and politics to below world averages.

According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2018 released by the World Economy Forum (WEF), Tuesday, Korea ranked 115 among 149 countries on gender equality. This is an improvement of just three places compared to last year.

On the gender gap index (GGI) the number one indicates full gender equality.

The GGI for Korea in the category of economic activity presence and opportunity for women was particularly low at 0.532, well below the world average of 0.632. The report stated this is due to the serious income difference between men and women here.

This has been confirmed in joint research conducted by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family and Statistics Korea in 2017, which showed that only 26.4 percent of male workers were irregular employees, who usually get low salaries, compared to 41 percent of female workers.

The average monthly salary for women was 1.86 million won ($1,654), or 64.1 percent of that paid to men

Also, the employment rate for men was 71.1 percent in 2016 against 50.2 percent for women.

In addition, Korea's rank in the category of female political activity lagged behind.

The country ranked 102nd in the ratio of female lawmakers, and 119th in female Cabinet members.

Korea topped the ranking in terms of women's chance to get education from elementary to high school; but ranked 113th for higher educational levels.

The WEF predicted that it would take 108 years for the world to achieve gender equality, and 202 years to narrow the economic gap between men and women.

Meanwhile, Iceland topped the ranking of gender equality with a GGI of 0.858, followed by Norway and Sweden. The Philippines was the only Asian country to rank in the top 10 with a GGI of 0.799.

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