Female irregular workers hit harder by COVID-19 pandemic

Female irregular workers, such as domestic workers, have suffered the biggest decline in their wages amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Korean Women's Development Institute. gettyimagesbank

By Jun Ji-hye

Female irregular workers have been hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic than their male counterparts, experiencing a decline in their wages, according to the Korean Women's Development Institute.

Among irregular workers, female "atypical" workers in particular, including domestic workers and private tutors, saw their wages drop by 10.4 percentage points between June and August last year, compared to a year earlier. To make matters worse, they received only 82.1 percent of the wages offered to male workers in the same category.

In Korea, there are two basic types of workers: regular workers with full-time positions and lifetime job security, and irregular workers. Irregular workers include contract workers of various types, as well as more precarious employment without contracts.

There is a subcategory among irregular workers in Korea called "atypical workers," which refers to even less secure employment with short-term or no contracts, such as dispatch workers, on-call daily workers, domestic workers, private tutors and independent contractors.

The institute said that female atypical workers suffered the biggest drop in their wages amid the pandemic, which began in January of last year.

During the same period, wages for all female irregular workers, which were only 80.6 percent of the wages of male irregular workers overall, declined by 3.5 percentage points.

In August 2020, the number of female irregular workers stood at 4.09 million across the country, down by 35,000 from a year earlier. The number of male irregular workers was tallied at only 3.33 million, and was down by only 21,000 from a year earlier.

In contrast, the number of female atypical workers stood at 861,000 in that month, down by 59,000, while the number of male workers in the same category stood at 1.21 million, up by 87,000.

"This difference is due to an increase in demand for male atypical workers, such as food delivery workers, while demand for domestic workers and private tutors, jobs that had been held mostly by women, decreased during the pandemic," an official from the institute said.

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