By Don Southerton, Korea Expert Witness Editor and Chief Blogger
Gender in the Korean workplace is a topic I will often discuss in this Blog. Much has changed. One only has to stroll through a Korean office to see women as important members of the team. At one time women were temporary workers, who quit after marriage for child-rearing. Today a high percentage of women have broken away from the old norms of previous generations and seek white-collar careers like their male colleagues. Nevertheless, some issues still are firmly rooted despite several years of government agency mandates on non-discrimination.
For example, “Appearance” is an issue even thought the Korean government has regulations to guard against the practice of attaching importance to women’s appearance such as in hiring. Many companies still prefer to hire young, pretty women.
To counter discrimination the government has developed and distributed sample recruitment forms and procedures. The new forms do not require applicants to enter their height, weight, age. or submit a photo. Instead, the emphasis in about their career and capabilities.
Tags: Discrimination Korean workplace, Don Southerton, Don Southerton expert witness, Expert witness international relocation family court, Gender in Korean workplace, Gender Korea, Korea consulting expert witness, Korea testifying expert
This was a recent article in Korea Times on Women and Equality in the Workplace.
In Korea’s this male dominated society, it’s still hard for women to land jobs and hold on to to them. They are often the last to be employed and the first to lose jobs when their employers carry out restructuring. Breaking this pattern is the primary job championed by Gender Equality Minister Byun Do-yoon.
She said there is long way to go before Korean society shifts to one that is truly equal in terms of gender.
“A lot of men nowadays crack a joke that Korean women’s social and economic status has already outstripped that of men. Despite some improvement, our society is still dominated by males, especially in the top echelons of society,” Byun said in an interview with The Korea Times. “I believe helping women land more jobs will be an important factor for the elevation of the social status of women.”
Byun, 61, said the ministry plans to help about 37,000 women land jobs this year. At the same time, it will provide counseling and training services for some 100,000 female job seekers.
“I will put my first priority on supporting women get jobs, especially those from low-income families and immigrants. I will do my best to help the underprivileged,” Byun said.
Under her leadership, the ministry will designate 50 employment centers nationwide for female job seekers. The centers will provide women, who had to quit their jobs due to childcare or for other reasons with career counseling and job training as well as recommendations to employers. Two counselors and five career designers will work at every center.
In particular, the ministry will introduce a “Housewife Internship” program, with 500,000 won being paid to those who participate in the program for three months. The minister has recently secured an extra budget for the program ― enough to benefit some 4,000 married women who have to earn money to sustain their families.
“We need to encourage more women to participate in economic activities,” Byun said. “We will continue to help them keep their jobs with comprehensive childcare programs as well.”
The ministry will put greater emphasis on building a women-friendly environment at workplaces. It has signed contracts with major companies to expand the corporate culture of gender equality. “We cannot force companies to treat men and women equally in personnel management. But many employers, who are free from gender stereotyping, realize that they could make more profits by efficiently using female employees. We will promote those companies as good examples,” Byeon said. “It will boost the competitiveness of Korea in the end.”
The status of women will be upgraded if more job opportunities are given to women.
The ministry has drawn up a “Gender Sensitive Budget” system, to eliminate elements discriminative against women.
“We have educated and trained government officials, and 25 government agencies have applied this system to 108 state-run projects,” Byeon said.
A gender-sensitive budget plan requires the government to prepare a mandatory analytic report on how the budget will affect men and women equally. It helps the government be more sensitive about gender before planning a budget.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/03/117_42068.html
Andrei Lankov’s article in Korea Times does a wonderful job ( no pun inteneded) sharing the rise of women workers in Korea.
Professor Lankov notes…
One of the most frequently discussed topics in the Korean press of the 1920s was the rise of a new social group: employed women. This was seen as a novelty ― and indeed it was one.
This does not mean that in earlier eras Korean women remained idly at home. This might be true in regard to women belonging to the affluent gentry, but they formed a tiny minority, hardly more than 1-2 percent of all Korean females.
Most women worked. They were weeding the fields, planting and harvesting rice, making clothes, and bringing water from distant wells. But they were not paid for their work, and their labor was to the benefit of their families. According to the modern (capitalist) logic, theirs was not “real work.”
Only in the late 1910s did some women begin to look for paid employment. Once again, the vast majority of the newly employed females went from paddy fields to the factories (usually, but not necessarily, this was a change for the better).
But these poor, semi-literate girls had no choice; their families were either unable or unwilling to feed them until they got married.
Educated elite women were a different story. In most cases, they were driven to work not by poverty but by their wish to acquire “economic independence.”
In the West, educated women began to join the workforce around 1890. In earlier times, girls from “good families” were supposed to stay at home, but from the 1890s, there was a growing labor market for female white-collar workers.
Of course, it was supposed that normally, a woman would not work after marriage, and nobody would seriously consider promoting a woman, even to a low level managerial position. But this was still a major break with the past.
The changes began in Germany and the U.S. but the new trends reached Korea only after the First World War, in the 1920s (and via Japan, of course).
From 1919, Korean girls could be employed as phone operators. In those days, before the introduction of dialing, connections at a telephone exchange had to be made manually.
Girls spent their work time near large switchboards, plugging and unplugging wires. The work required concentration ― and other qualities as well.
In order to get such a job, an applicant had to have some formal education, a pleasant voice and be taller than 143 cm (smaller girls could not reach the upper part of a switchboard).
In January 1920, Cho Su-ja became the first Korean woman to get a clerical job at a bank (Chohung Bank).
Cho soon was transferred to Tokyo, so all the attendant fame was passed on to Kim Saeng-ryo, who became a bank employee in December 1921. It was said that her presence attracted visitors to the bank branch where she worked.
For the less educated, there were positions as sales assistants in the new department stores. The shop owners soon discovered that the presence of girls with good looks could increase sales and began to hire female staff.
In those times, however, being a “shop girl” was seen as a low middle-class occupation, suitable for the educated minority. Farm girls would not get such jobs, which required literacy and numeracy ― skills which the average country girl seldom had until the late 1930s.
And a “shop girl” also had to have a reasonably sophisticated appearance. Girl typists could be found in Korea as well, but in much smaller numbers than in Western countries.
The reasons were linguistic. Until the 1960s, Korean documents used a large number of Chinese characters, which could not be typed with any convenience (there were some Chinese typewriters, but these contraptions were remarkably slow and cumbersome).
Thus, documents usually had to be handwritten. And, of course, most of them were compiled in Japanese anyway (with the same abundance of Chinese characters).
Elite working women included professionals: female doctors, journalists, and artists. But they were few and far between, since in Korea women could not receive a university education.
Thus, all female professionals had to study overseas, ensuring that their numbers remained small. Few Korean families had money to pay for overseas studies, and only a fraction of those who did would be willing to spend such an exorbitant sum on their daughters ― or sons.
Thus, these female professionals were an elite and saw themselves as such.
Female teachers of primary and middle schools formed a much larger group. Being a teacher was not as glamorous and lucrative as, say, being a doctor, but it was still a prestigious and reasonably well-paid position.
In 1930, the average female teacher would be paid 48 won a month ― that is, twice the average salary of an unskilled female worker.
It was commonly understood that a woman worked only until she married ― with some professionals being an exception. Married life was seen as incompatible with work, and this view was commonly held by women themselves.
Perhaps such was really the case, since in the era before gas stoves, vacuum cleaners and running water, mundane family tasks were very time-consuming, leaving almost no time for anything else.
The system of obligatory or near-obligatory retirement of married women lasted until the 1980s, when the growth of feminist consciousness and technological changes finally made work and family compatible.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/special/special_view.asp?newsIdx=43691&categoryCode=177
Hankyoreh notes: Discrimination related to women workers increases sharply amid economic crisis
Amid the economic crisis, cases in which companies are firing pregnant woman illegally are on the rise.
A thirty-six year old woman who is in her fifth month of pregnancy, and only known by the surname initial “H,” repents the fact that she informed her company manager of her pregnancy because the company has recently placed her the first in line to be fired.
She says, “The company manager has urged me to resign of my will. The manager also said that if I wanted to keep my position, they would give me half of my regular income.”
Another woman worker with the surname initial “K,” who is thirty-seven years old and in her fifth month of pregnancy has also been urged to resign from the company after receiving unpaid holidays. “K” says, “It is impossible to get another job after quitting due to my pregnancy. If the company treated my case as a forced resignation, then I could file a jobless claim, however they have urged me to make a document in which I declare that I resigned from the company voluntarily.” A person who resigns from his company voluntarily cannot file for unemployment claim.
Yu Da-young, a consultant for labor-management relations, says, “Companies have tried to avoid forced resignations because the Labor Ministry can sometimes investigate the cases for unfair dismissal.” She added, “If a pregnant woman made a document in which she said she resigned from the company voluntarily, the company may be able to avoid an inspection.”
The Korea Women’s Hot Line (KWHL) said on Tuesday that there are sharp increases in cases in which women workers are calling the KWHL about this kind of discrimination. Requests for consultation related to this form of discrimination have increased to 38 cases during the January to March period compared to 14 cases from the same period last year.
Cho U-kyun, an official in the department on women workers in the Labor Ministry says, “A female worker who has been urged to make a false report about her resignation should file a petition with the National Labor Relations Commission instead of accepting the company’s request.”
Seon-Back Mi-rock, an activist of KWHL, however, criticizes the Labor Ministry, and says, “The Labor Ministry should not pass the buck to female workers. They should strengthen their inspection of cases of discrimination.”