Glass Ceiling in Korea

Nowadays, inequality became a hot issue in our country. Since inequality is prevailing in every culture, some tend to think it is natural to be treated in not equal way. For instance, we are well adapted to the social norms or certain stereotypes, which encourages women to be obedient to their husbands or sometimes it is pretty natural that women earns less money than men. Regardless of individual’s ability or performance, many women are less competitive in a job market, and I think this gender inequality in workplace is really serious problem we have to overcome. It is well known that there exists a word ‘career women’ but not ‘career man’. I think this word, ‘career women’ explicitly shows society’s expectation that women with distinguishable performance with her career is less likely to happen than man.

Recently, in May 1st, there was a news article which titled “Korea’s ‘glass ceiling index’ was the last among OECD countries for 5 years in a row.” In this article, about half of the working women argue that when assigning position in a job, gender matters a lot. Not only the first assigning, but also promotion of women takes much longer time than men. According to news article, 4 year college graduate man can promote to manager within 3 years, but women needs 6 or 7 years and with lower salaries. Some statistics in this article shows that out of 819 employees in Korea, 65.7% of women employees replied that there exists glass ceiling, and 41.3% of men also agreed that there is glass ceiling. There might be many reasons for this inequality, but primary reason is due to household chores and childcare. If woman is married and have a baby, they have no choice but to leave their workplace for several months or years. Many companies hate their employee’s disconnection of career, which makes women to be less competitive in a labor market. This inequality affects women to be less motivated to work hard for their company, and even cause ‘learned helplessness’ in her daily lives. It is major loss for the country as a whole.