Statistics Highlight South Korean Women's Low Status - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Only 58.7% of South Korean women have a paying job, joining Italian, Greek and Japanese women as among the least likely among OECD nation citizens to have a paying job.

• Only one in eight South Korean women worked part-time, also among the lowest rates in the OECD.

• One reason for the low labor participation rate is minimal daycare support, with only 33.9% of South Korean with children ages 3 to 5 using, or being able to use, childcare facilities, vying with Turkey for the lowest OECD rate.

• Those South Korean women who do have a job put in the longest hours of all, at an average 44.3 hours a week, 10 hours more than the OECD average, but they earn only 62% of what their male counterparts make, one of the largest gender gaps among OECD countries.

• Among those women with a job, nearly a third are self-employed, about the level of Mexico. The South Korean newspaper, the Choson Ilbo, reported that those countries with the highest self-employment rates are those with the lowest women’s rights rankings, and vice-versa.

• The data come from the current OECD Factbook and were distributed by the Korea Women’s Development Institute as it noted Women’s Week in July 2009.

The Chosun Ilbo report