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.