South Korean Wage Advances Taking a Hit

South Korea has the largest gender wage gap of all OECD countries, and things look like they may be about to get worse.

President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea is reported to have said amid the financial crisis, “The most urgent issue on our hands is to create jobs for the heads of households.”

The scholar and blogger James Turnbull, whose main thesis addresses how South Korean women suffered most economically during the 1997-98 Asian currency crisis (and culture changed significantly as a result), blogs that “that otherwise innocuous-sounding statement of Lee Myung-bak’s that I’ve highlighted above may have huge long-term implications for Korean feminism.”

According to Working Korea 2007 by Kim Yoo-Sun of the Korea Labor and Society Institute, the gender wage gap shrank in decades leading up to the currency crisis, with women making 45% of what men made in 1980; 48% in 1985; 53% in 1990; 60% in 1995; and peaking at 64% in 1998.

If employers follow the advice to prefer heads of households, on the paternalistic assumption that married women can rely on their husband’s income and single women will depend on their father’s, the stagnation could turn into a decline.

So far, Turnbull reports, there has been no rush to lay women off. “[T]he Korean labour market fundamentally changed as a result of [the currency] crisis, in the decade since Korea going from having the largest number of job-for-life, male-breadwinner salaryman-style jobs in the OECD to having the most irregular jobs instead …, a huge change that has meant that, even though Korean women do still have the lowest labor participation in the OECD, has resulted in families with dual incomes being the norm rather than the exception….”