“You should be broadminded enough to retort with a joke questions that smack of sexual harassment.” “Make sure you’re ready to run small errands, like serving coffee or photocopying documents.” “When asked about marriage and childbirth, just say you have no such plans at least until 30.”
These are part of the “model” replies that female applicants are advised to make in job interviews, uploaded on Work Net, an employment information site run by the Ministry of Labor.
We are at a loss for words how a government agency, which should take the lead in eliminating sexual harassment and discrimination at workplaces, could offer such obviously sexist guidelines as these. By doing so, the ministry is overlooking or even encouraging such behavior by women employees’ male superiors or colleagues.
Faced with protests from women groups, the ministry said it would delete the content, find out how it occurred, and offer education against sex discrimination to employees of the Korea Employment Information Service, which actually operates the site. “The incident seems to have resulted from some KEIS employees conveying content provided by private agencies,” a ministry spokesman said.
This is a lame excuse for loose supervision, but it still reflects the reality of the domestic job market and Korean society as a whole.
Such overall tolerance of sexist remarks or acts at workplaces is behind the series of outrageous harassment cases involving the so-called social leaders that made headlines recently. A former National Assembly speaker was sued by a woman who stopped caddying because of his continuous teasing. A former prosecutor general who runs a golf course called out a female employee taking a shower, and kissed her cheeks. An army division commander assaulted his female aide, while a renowned professor harassed a couple of graduate students.
What all these ugly episodes illustrate are not sexual desire but the warped sense of power and authority among the moneyed and powerful in this society. The victims can hardly fight back against these largely aged perpetrators because at stake are their salaries, grades and careers. Korea should harshly punish these assaulters as criminals _ guilty of evils that deepen class conflict and social distrust.
Widespread sexual harassment and discrimination hurts the economy, too.
Korea, along with Japan, belongs to the group of industrial countries whose utilization of female work force remains at a pitiable level. The country had the lowest employment rate of women with post-secondary education in 2012 at 61.2 percent, way below the OECD average of 78.6 percent. A report by Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, calculated that eliminating the gap between male and female employment rates could boost GDP in America by 9 percent, and in Japan by up to 16 percent. Such positive effects will be even greater in Korea.
It is long past time for the government to more strictly implement rules against sexual harassment and discrimination at workplaces. Who could enforce such policy better than the nation’s first female president?