How South Korean girls face profession obstacles

At 27, a girl in South Korea earns 8% lower than male friends. By her late 50s, she earns 50% much less. This is in accordance with authorities wage information revealed in a latest Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.  

South Korea is a worldwide expertise and industrial powerhouse, however its gender pay hole has remained the best within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) since comparable data started in 1992.  

“The gender division of labor inside the house leads on to a gender division of labor within the labor market,” Min Hee Kim, a Korean activist for girls labor struggles, informed DW. 

The drawback, she argues, will not be merely that ladies are paid lower than males. As girls age, the kinds of work available to them narrows and the implications of decrease pay, profession breaks and precarious jobs accumulate.  

For the report, “Too Old and a Woman,” HRW interviewed 41 South Korean girls aged 28 to 87 about their working lives.  

Structural boundaries to girls’s careers

Discrimination has modified kind fairly than disappeared, Kim mentioned. Until the Nineteen Eighties, it was authorized for employers to fireplace girls merely for getting married, a follow referred to as “marriage-based dismissal,” the place employers assumed a married woman would quickly depart to lift youngsters anyway. 

Today, “it’s tough to brazenly say, ‘We will not rent you since you’re a girl,'” Kim added. But caregiving responsibilities still fall on women, pushing them into lower-paid jobs once they attempt to return to work. 

According to the HRW report, girls’s college attainment has handed males’s because the Nineteen Eighties. Higher training would counsel equal alternative after commencement, however the job market says in any other case.  

One 12 months after graduating, girls already earn 22% lower than males, in accordance with a 2024 examine. 

Many girls informed HRW that after leaving work for marriage or youngsters, probabilities of returning to the workforce had been restricted to a handful of jobs comparable to name facilities, cleansing or caregiving.  

Women who decide to give attention to their profession informed HRW they hit a glass ceiling at work. Women held 18% of supervisor jobs in 2024, and solely 5 of 38 senior civil servants had been girls. 

Wages peak and drop off

Women’s wages peak of their late 30s after which steadily decline, in accordance with Labor Ministry survey information cited by HRW.  

South Korea’s Gender Ministry informed HRW that profession interruptions, together with occupational segregation and discrimination inside organizations, drive the hole.  

J. Mi-sook, 53, informed HRW that her three years of expertise weren’t acknowledged by her subsequent employer, so she began at entry stage on a decrease wage. 

The longer girls spend outdoors the workforce, the much less expertise they accumulate on their resumes, which ends up in much less pay and fewer work stability.  

Kim pointed to structural discrimination, an idea from the report that HRW describes as discrimination so embedded in social practices and establishments that even the individuals harmed by it could not acknowledge it as an issue.  

“When you might be alone, it’s straightforward to suppose, ‘It’s as a result of I’m not succesful sufficient,’ or ‘It’s as a result of I’m getting older,'” she mentioned. It’s solely when girls who’ve had related experiences meet and speak, she added, that they notice, “this wasn’t simply my drawback.” 

It will get tougher as you become older

Park Jae-soon, 61, was compelled to retire at 60 from a utility firm and now works part-time as a care employee. Her annual revenue fell from 55 million gained ($40,500/€35,600) to fifteen.6 million gained, a 72% drop.

HRW argues the necessary retirement age and the “peak wage” system, which lets employers lower older employees’ pay within the years earlier than retirement, ought to each be abolished. 

According to information cited within the report, girls acquired 53% of males’s National Old Age Pension on common in October 2025, a 47% hole.  

“I feel what’s necessary right here is that this isn’t merely an issue of middle-aged girls having issue discovering jobs,” Kim mentioned.

“The work that ladies have historically carried out inside the house, like cleansing, cooking, caregiving and managing different individuals’s feelings, is classed as ‘work appropriate for girls’ when it enters the labor market, after which low wages are assigned to it,” she added. 

From first paycheck to pension 

HRW argues the drawback builds stage by stage, from a girl’s first paycheck up till her pension. 

“Career interruption amongst girls of their 30s is already a pension subject,” Kim mentioned. “Part-time work amongst girls of their 40s is a pension subject, and low wages amongst girls of their 50s are already a pension subject,” she added.

South Korea’s authorities has mentioned it’ll pursue a phased improve within the statutory retirement age from 60 to 65.

“This can’t be solved with only one coverage. Equal pay for equal work must be really carried out, wage buildings must be clear, and care must be handled as a public duty fairly than one thing that’s pushed onto particular person households and ladies,” Kim mentioned.  

The rights activist mentioned the report is a vital start line, however believes its image is incomplete.

Most interviewees had been recruited by way of civic organizations and largely in Seoul, she famous, whereas disabled girls, migrant employees and others might expertise a special mixture of age and gender discrimination. 

“The necessary query will not be merely, ‘How a lot discrimination do girls face?'” she mentioned. “It is which girls, in what positions, develop into more and more distanced from which sources and rights as they get older.”

Edited by: Wesley Rahn