For Korean women, glass ceiling is more like concrete

“Glass ceiling” is a universal term for describing the barriers preventing more women reaching the top echelons of the corporate world. But to many working women in Korea, who have experienced the limitations to their opportunities as being blatant and often unbreakable, the ceiling has to be looking more like concrete.

It’s almost too easy to meet a female employee who will express frustration about the pace of her advancement at the workplace. A mid-level manager from a Hyundai affiliate was scanning around for job openings at other firms because women “can only go so far on a Hyundai payroll.”

Another woman in her early 30s who had applied for a mid-level position at a Samsung affiliate said she was asked whether she had any plans to have children in the future. Long story short, she didn’t get the job. Whether a “no” would have mattered more than her MBA degree is left to the imagination.

While policymakers here continue to speechify about progressing equality between the sexes and improving corporate prospects for women, most employers remain indifferent about smashing the metaphorical ceiling, glass or whatever. There are only a handful of female chief executive officers (CEOs) among the top Korean companies and half of them are daughters of the parent group’s chairman.

According to a study by the Samsung Economic Research Institute (SERI), a think tank financed by, yes, the same business group that wonders whether married women will want to have kids, found that less than 1 percent of Korean firms that hire more than 1,000 employees have female CEOs.

Only 17 percent of the companies’ mid-level managers were women, while the proportion of female executives was just over 6 percent. In comparison, 3.6 percent of the global firms that make Fortune magazine’s Fortune 500 list were led by female CEOs, a six-fold increase from 0.6 percent in 2000.

More damning figures come in courtesy of New York-based research firm GMI Ratings, which recently released its “2012 Women on Boards” survey that showed women are making the slowest gains in boardrooms in Korea than in any other developing economy.

While countries such as Britain and Australia have been dabbling with government legislation to force companies to increase the number of women in boardrooms, with the discussions including measures as tough as quotas, Korean firms haven’t been under that kind of pressure.

“Korean firms will talk about employing more female executives every year when the season for personnel decisions come. However, it’s hard to expect them to increase the number of female CEOs when the pool of candidates among female executives is so shallow,” said SERI researcher Kim Jae-won.

As remote a possibility as it is, enforcing a quota on Korean companies to get more women in their boardrooms might not be the answer in a country where a large chunk of female employees are sidelined from payrolls before they even get to sniff at management positions.

Government figures confirm that women in their 30s are dropping out of the workplace at an alarming rate and their lack of freedom in setting a work-life balance has been identified as the culprit. The pay gap between men and women also remains wide, so when couples get to discuss how they are going to afford childcare, it’s normally the wife who stays at home.

Economic activity among women aged between 25 and 29 was measured at 69.8 percent in 2010. However, the figure dropped dramatically to 54.6 percent for women aged between 30 and 34, the pressure of working long hours and a lack of maternity support taking a toll on mothers with young children.

On average, a female employee earned less than 70 percent of what her male counterpart took home last year. And the employment statistics for women are padded by casual and precarious jobs to more of a degree than men, Statistics Korea said.

In recent years, government officials here have worked hard to introduce family-friendly policies, such as expanding tax benefits, providing longer maternity leave and establishing more daycare places for children of working mothers. But the effects of such changes have been subdued, thanks in part to a large number of companies reluctant to make significant changes to their working environment.

The Korea Employers Federation, an influential business lobby, went as far as to claim that the government efforts to boost births were putting too much pressure on the finances of firms, which may prevent them from hiring women.

GMI Ratings’ report, based on a survey of over 4,300 companies in 45 countries, said that women held 10.8 percent of directors’ seats worldwide as of the fourth quarter of last year, up from 9.8 percent at the end of 2010 to represent the highest share ever.

The study also found gender balances differ widely in boardrooms around the world. In Norway, women held 36.3 percent of the board seats, compared with Korea’s 1.9 percent, which was the lowest among nations categorized as developing economies.

Japan came in dead last among industrialized nations with 1.1 percent women directors, while the proportion for U.S. companies was measured at 12.6 percent, slightly above the 11.1 percent average of industrialized nations. Women held 7.2 percent of directors’ seats in industrialized nations, with South Africa (17.4 percent) and China (8.5 percent) topping the list in terms of boardroom diversity.

Korea’s inability to take advantage of the glut in the female workforce is alarming when more old people, combined with a declining working age population, are resulting in murkier projections for long-term economic growth.

Korea currently has one of the lowest birth rates among maturing economies, with its 2010 figure standing at 1.22 births per woman, well below the 1.71 average of Organization for Economic Cooperation for Development (OECD) nations. <Korea Times/Kim Tong-hyung>

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