Korea ranked last in OECD on female graduate employment.

Despite months of positive blog posts about life in Korea, there are things that really bother me.  Korea is a tremendous place to live, but there are some changes that Korea as a whole must make.  Many of the things center around the enormous gap between genders.

A recent OECD report has ranked Korea last (last!) in OECD countries for female graduate employment.  An article I managed to dig out of a Korean newspaper can be found here.  Korean women are educated at the same rate as Korean men (63%) but their workplace participation rates are the same as they were 20 years ago (55%).  It seems that everything else in Korea has changed in the last 20 years, but not this.

There have been some policies introduced recently to try and address this issue, including parental leave (Korean men are now entitled to two days unpaid leave - yes, two days, unpaid - upon the birth of a child) and heavily subsidised or free child care.  However, according to the OECD, "as long as workplace cultures involve long working hours, socialising after work, and a seniority-based promotion and payment system which punishes women for leaving their job on childbirth, social policy reform will have limited effect".

The long standing low fertility rate in Korea means that they will need to more actively consider how to improve the female workplace participation rate, or they will face an economically damaging labour shortage, not to mention the wasted intellectual capital of all the highly educated women being pushed out of the workforce.  However, parity in workplace participation will remain unattainable unless Korean men increase their contribution to unpaid domestic labour (current assessments have their contribution at an average of 45 minutes per week).  Additionally, Korean workplaces will need to become more family-friendly, or in fact learn what family-friendly actually means.

If this doesn't change, Korea runs the risk of losing the momentum of economic growth that it has managed to generate.  If birth rate stays low and Korean women continue to shun marriage in greater numbers, Korea will find itself risking stagnation.  Demography always wins. 

Korean-Italian Pesto - curiously tasty

Snuggled under the doona on the couch watching Nigella on a cold cold COLD Sunday afternoon, I found myself bemoaning the lack of fresh basil in Korea.  I have tried to grow it, with little to no success.  You can buy enough basil for sprinkling on a dish but Nigella was making pesto, so I wanted to make pesto, and that would take a "second mortgage" amount of basil.  So I thought why not use what I've got.  Let me introduce you to perilla leaves...

Perilla leaves, called ggaennip in Korean, are often referred to as sesame leaves.  The leaves have a minty-sesame-apple-coriander type flavour....so, in short, delicious.  Most commonly used to wrap up pieces of bbq pork, I decided I would use them to make a Korean-ish pesto.

Following Nigella's lead, I threw a bit of each of the following things into the food processor:
- garlic
- pine nuts
- cherry tomatoes
- anchovies (to add salt, rather than parmesan cheese)
- capers
- raisins
- olive oil
- a giant handful of perilla leaves.

Threw the result into a dish of cooked pasta and the result was pretty good actually.  It didn't taste like any pesto I'd ever eaten before, but it was really quite nice.  I had my doubts about the raisins, but Nigella added raisins and who was I to argue?!  I have since tried it without and turns out Nigella is right on this one (no surprise there), the pesto needs a little bit of sweet to counterbalance all the other flavours.

I wonder what else I can adapt to suit Korean ingredients?

From the Battle of Kapyong to Winter Sonata

Winter Sonata is a Korean drama series, first aired in 2002, which is credited with helping the spread of Korean culture around Asia, known as the Korean Wave (Hallyu).  Hallyu started in the late 1990s, was propelled by the success of Winter Sonata and has probably received another significant boost with Gangnam Style.

Winter Sonata was filmed on Namiseom, a small island in Chuncheon province (also famous for Dak Glabi - a delicious stir fried chicken dish, but more on that in another post). Winter Sonata is credited with improving the image of South Korea among its Japanese audience and setting fashion trends throughout East Asia.  All of this has also led to a jump in the number of tourists visiting Namiseom.  It is only about 90 mins drive from Seoul and well worth the trip, even for those who (like me) haven't seen Winter Sonata.

Happy New Year

For those in my home country sweltering through what must be an unbearably hot week, these shots from the Hangang early this morning may help cool you down.  We are apparently getting through our coldest winter in 50 years here in Seoul.  It was somewhere around -20 when I took these pictures on a very short walk before breakfast.