Mobilizing South Korea's Women (2001)

Too few college-educated women participate in South Korea's workforce, a factor that is likely to affect the country's prospects for long-term economic growth. Educated women must therefore play a larger role if South Korea is to become one of the world's most economically advanced nations. That goal may be a stretch. South Korea already belongs to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). But a McKinsey study has found that if the country is to become one of the OECD's top ten members (ranked by gross domestic product per head) as of 2010, its GDP per capita (purchasing-power-parity basis) would have to grow by 6.1 percent annually. [1] Such high growth would generate 3 million new jobs, at least 1.2 million of them for professionals. But as things stand today, South Korea wouldn't be able to fill those jobs only with men, since more than 90 percent of its college-educated men already participate in the labor force. Although nearly half of today's college graduates in South Korea are women, only 54 percent of its female college graduates participate in the labor force -- the lowest such rate of any member of the OECD. By contrast, the corresponding rate for South Korean men nearly matches the rates for men in Sweden and the United States (Exhibit 1). The McKinsey study identified ten obstacles for women in the South Korean workforce, including discriminatory hiring policies, ineffective legislation on working women's rights, and social prejudice. It recommended several remedies, from launching equal-opportunity programs to reinforcing employment-discrimination laws to using the mass media for a campaign against sex bias. The way to get women into the workforce, the study found, was to relieve them of the burden of childcare, which the respondents to a 1998 survey of nearly 40,000 South Korean women perceived as the biggest obstacle to employment -- more serious than prejudice. Their perception is grounded in reality: the labor force participation rate is particularly low for women in their mid-20s and early 30s. This so-called M-curve contrasts with the reverse U-curve of countries such as Canada and Sweden (Exhibit 2). In practice, it means that women leave the workforce during their peak learning years because there is no one to take care of their children. This phenomenon gives rise to discriminatory human-resources policies --companies don't think it worthwhile to invest in the careers of women who are destined to leave the workforce -- and those policies are responsible for the concentration of women in lower-status jobs and for career ceilings. South Korea isn't the only Asian country that fails to make full use of its highly educated women. In Japan, 98 percent of college-educated men participate in the labor force, compared with only 68 percent of college-educated women; in the Philippines, those figures are 83 and 47 percent, respectively. In some parts of Asia (including Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore), women also leave the workforce temporarily in their mid-20s and early 30s--or even permanently when they marry or give birth (Exhibit 3, on the next page). In South Korea, childcare problems manifest themselves in two ways: inadequate maternity benefits and poor day-care options. Maternity leaves will probably be raised to 90 days in November, from 60 days--a very large step for South Korea. …