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Korean Women’s Power
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The Bright & the Seamy Sides
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By Park, Sun-young, reporter, park-sy@knu.ac.kr
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등록일: 2007-03-01 오전 12:00:00
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'i>Yeo-Pung(女風)' Maybe you have heard this word from a lot of news related to women’s power. In brief, it means a situation in which women wield great power in Korea.'Yeo-Pung(女風)seems to reflect the international trend for more and more women to have strong power all over the world. The 21st century has been called the century of women in leadership.
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▲ Park Geun-hye & Han Myeong-sook
ⓒ photo by Kyunghyang paper |
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We can often see lots of women leaders via the mass media. For example, women such as the first woman House speaker in the USA, Nancy Pelosi, a senator and a presidential hopeful in the USA, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and a presidential candidate in France, Marie Segolene Royal. Many women leaders have appeared in Korea: the former Prime Minister, Han Myeong-sook, the former Grand National Party chairwoman, Park Geun-hye, and the former Minister of Justice, Kang Kum-sil. Many women like them show their leadership not only internally but also externally, and women are growing powerful in their great influence in political circles. Most notably, Korean women are acquiring political power in what has up to now been a male-dominated Korean society.
It was normal until the late 1970s in Korea for women to give up their jobs when they got married and to stay in their houses, looking after the family. Since then, Korean women have been better educated than their mothers, thanks in part to the influence of feminists. Only 33% of Korean parents wanted to send their daughters to university in 1977, compare with 61% in 1990, and 80.8 % Korean female high school graduates went to university in 2005. In other words, one in four women in Korea went to university.
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▲ National Statistical Office(NSO) statistics
ⓒ photo by Donga-ilbo |
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The power of Korean women is a direct result of increased higher education, and females took about 50% of the jobs created last year. According to the National Statistical Office (NSO), women currently occupy 69.4% of the 222,000 jobs that guarantee a high salary and social status. In particular, 54% of the 190 judicial trainees appointed last year to be judges or prosecutors were women. Also the number of women lawmakers, executives and managers increased from 2,000 to 47,000 in the same period, compare with a decrease in the number of men from 529,000 to 524,000. The number of male workers, however, is still greater than that of female ones, standing at 13.4 million last year, compared with 9.71 million females.
Korean women ranked 53rd of 73 countries last year according to the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) performed annually by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). This is an improvement compared to a few years ago. Korea ranked 63rd in 2003 and 59th last year. The power of women in Finland, ranked 5th in the GEM data, is high compared to Korea. About 50% of employees are women and the President in Finland is a woman. You can also see more female students and teachers than male ones in that country. One reason for this situation is that men and women enjoy an equal status in Finland. The other reason is that Finland supports working women through a social system, so there are many working women in the country. Nowadays, more and more Korean women work at the same time as pursuing their personal goals, but they face an inadequate welfare system. For this reason, the government needs to provide childcare for working women.
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▲ The World Association of Women Enterpreneurs' committee meeting
ⓒ Photo by Yonhap news |
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Although the percentage of working women is increasing compared with the past and Korea shows some signs of changes nowadays, many working women encounter deep-seated prejudice. Moreover, woman power is an essential factor in leading Korea to become a competitive country. Thus, the government should realize the importance of the role of woman-power and take some appropriate measures.
[No.319]
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 Review |
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 Book cafe |
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 Language Usage |
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 Reader's Letters |
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