A Woman’s Place Is in the Office
Until very recently, a woman could not legally be the head of a household in South Korea. Under the terms of a family record system called hoju, each Korean was registered as belonging to a particular household, the head of which could only be a man. A woman leaving her family home to marry was removed from her father’s record and placed on that of her new husband. Any children they had would automatically join the husband’s record, and remain there even in the event of divorce.
Though introduced only in 1898 under the influence of the encroaching Japan, hoju fit well with the male-first culture that had existed in Korea since the rise of neo-Confucianism in the fourteenth century. Earlier dynasties like the Shilla and Koryo had some degree of sexual equality, but the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) saw the status of women shrink dramatically. Women could not initiate divorce, though their husbands could divorce them on a whim; they had to strictly obey their husband’s commands; they were not able to inherit property; and they were generally forbidden from participating in public life.
When the National Assembly voted in 2005 to abolish the hoju system, the change was hailed by women’s groups as a landmark victory for equality. In the same year, though, the United Nations’ Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) ranked South Korea just 59th among 116 countries surveyed on the extent to which women are found in senior management, professional, and political roles—an unusually poor showing for an economically developed, democratic nation. Plainly, the influence of five centuries of Joseon government cannot be swept away with a few legal revisions.
However, times are beginning to change. The current generation of young Korean women is starting to explore opportunities that their mothers and grandmothers never had. This is not due to any women’s rights mass movement—only 16 percent of Korean women call themselves feminists, according to a 2007 survey by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper—but rather “because people realized it is more efficient” to give women the chance to get out of the kitchen and into the workplace, according to 2008 Korean Woman of the Year, and first Korean in space, Soyeon Yi.
As with South Korea’s growing internationalization, the transformation of women’s roles in society is an example of this country’s ability to set itself on the right track in a time of need. By 2026, 23 percent of South Koreans will be aged sixty-five or over. Their pension requirements will place a huge burden on taxpayers. Additionally, the low birth rate means that there will be a relative lack of young people of working age to make tax contributions. It is absolutely imperative then that the size of the workforce increases. Bringing women into the office is an obvious and inevitable part of the solution.
“If You Are Educated, You Won’t Listen to Your Husband”
During the Shilla, Koryo, and very early Joseon eras, couples would typically follow a tradition of matrilocal marriage, by getting married in the bride’s parents’ home, and then living with them until they had children (following that, they would live with the husband’s parents). Women had equal rights of inheritance and could remarry after divorce. The women of Shilla were able to travel more or less freely and “possessed more rights and privileges than women were to ever hold again in Korea until the twentieth century,” according to Mary E. Connor, president of the Korea Academy for Educators, in her essay “Women and Marriage.” The situation of women deteriorated precipitously with the rise of neo-Confucianist ethics, particularly from the fifteenth century onwards. The reign of King Sejong (r. 1418–1450) saw the introduction of rules that restricted women’s ability to visit temples. Ironically, it was the elite yangban women who bore the brunt of the changes in the Joseon era: the administration of King Seongjong (r. 1469–1494) introduced a national code that stated, “Any woman from the sajok [yangban class] who attends a festival in the mountains or the riverside, or conducts a ritual ceremony, shall receive 100 lashes.” Seongjong’s reign also saw the introduction of regulations preventing the descendents of women who married more than once from taking the civil service examination, thus blocking their path to yangban status.
By the seventeenth century, women’s inheritance rights were curtailed, as well as their ability to conduct ancestral commemoration ceremonies. The lower status of women had become fully entrenched and was supported by the growth of literature that promoted a kind of idealized, subservient neo-Confucian woman. In government-published textbooks like Yeosaseo, from the eighteenth century, women were encouraged to be virtuous and follow standards of Joseon etiquette, serving their husbands and in-laws at all times. They were expected to produce male heirs (failure to produce a male heir was considered a woman’s fault and reasonable grounds for divorce). By this time, women were also legally obliged to cover their faces whenever they left their homes.
Not that they left their homes often. The status of women had eroded to the extent that the family home became the only domain regarded as suitable for a woman. It is said that the game of nolttwigi, in which participants jump up and down on seesaws, was created by women who wished to look over their walls to gain a view of the outside world—as there were few opportunities to do so otherwise. Even basic education was denied to women, and the realms of politics, business, intellectual affairs, and anything else deemed “outer” or “public” were reserved for men alone. It was also considered perfectly acceptable for a husband to beat his wife. Many old expressions exist that reveal the harsh nature of the times: “If you don’t beat your wife every three days, she’ll become a fox,” held one. As in other countries, the fox was a symbol of cunning, wily femininity. In Korean folklore, the gumiho—nine-tailed fox—could take on the form of a beautiful woman, seducing men and eating their livers.
Some women were less restricted than others. Among the poorest classes, it was necessary for many women to work—in farming, for instance. Shamanist musok-in, most of whom were female, and kisaeng, (who, like Japanese geisha, entertained men with elegant dress, song, conversation, and sometimes sexual favors) performed their roles in the world outside the home. Such women could become powerful through their influence over men in authority. However, in rank musok-in and kisaeng were still considered to be of the lowest class of people and ostracized in public, regardless of their abilities and earning power. The ideal woman was the one who stayed indoors and faithfully served her husband and in-laws.
Joseon mores built up over five centuries and thus became deeply ingrained in the mindsets of Korean men and women. Even the upheavals of Japanese colonialism, division, and war did not correct the unequal balance of roles. From the 1950s onward, the government began moving towards the provision of schooling for all children, regardless of gender—yet many girls were prevented from benefiting from it by their own families. Soyeon Yi says that her own mother “was a victim of conservatism... My grandfather said, ‘if you are educated, you won’t listen to your [future] husband,’’’ and so she was not even allowed to attend middle school.
Changing Times
Dr. Yi’s mother retained a life-long yearning for education and, like many people who are forced to go without something, pinned all her hopes on her children. She insisted that her daughter be treated as an equal to her brothers—something Dr. Yi’s father himself did not oppose. “You are all just as precious to me,” Dr. Yi quotes her mother as saying, with obvious emotion and pride. “She almost cried on my PhD graduation day,” Dr. Yi adds. Thanks to such changed attitudes, women have had virtually the same access to education as men for some years now. By 2010, 49.1 percent of Masters’ degrees awarded in South Korea went to women.
Nonetheless, the range of work opportunities presented to women following graduation did not grow at a comparable rate. South Korea’s Gender Empowerment Measure rank in 1995, according to the UN, was 90th out of 116 countries surveyed, only marginally better than Arabic countries. A female civil service recruit in the early 1990s would have had to give details about her “wife” on official forms, since there was no slot for “husband” or “spouse.” This is perhaps unsurprising considering less than 2 percent of civil servants at the time were women. Women who graduated in the 1980s or early 1990s were generally expected to marry as soon as possible and give up on any career aspirations to focus on raising children.
The unfortunate cohort of women who received all the advantages of education except the chance to actually use it are an anomaly. Men in positions of authority discriminated against them and ensured that they quit their jobs after marriage, regardless of whatever qualifications they may have had. Thus, the current crop of leaders in their forties and fifties is lacking in female representation. Indeed, only 4.7 percent of executives of large Korean firms are women. This is much higher than Japan, where the figure is just 1 percent, but by international standards, Korea does lag. For those who came later, graduating in the late 1990s and 2000s, the picture is strikingly different. Dr. Yi, an engineer by training, recounts that older supervisors would express surprise when her projects were successful, “even though you’re a woman.” They would always refer to her as a “woman engineer” rather than simply an engineer. However, male peers just considered her an engineer of equal status, reflecting the changed attitude that had occurred in the span of a generation. Hiring practices now are much more equal in many fields, especially the public sector. In 2010, 71 percent of newly appointed judges, and 56.8 percent of newly appointed prosecutors, were women. With figures like these, it may not be too long before young men start complaining of discrimination.
Private Korean firms do still lag relative to the state, but even the old-school chaebol have begun dramatically increasing their female headcounts. Between 2002 and 2006, for instance, the number of women at the largest ten business groups rose by 47.9 percent (though seven out of ten of their new hires still are men). Their increased interest in hiring women may be partly explained by the fact that the chaebol are looking over their shoulders at the Seoul offices of foreign firms, who have derived an advantage over them by taking their pick of the most talented female graduates, the kind of potential top performers the chaebol did not formerly pay attention to. In this way, greater opportunities for women have had little to do with campaigning for rights or positive discrimination, and everything to do with efficiency. People are realizing that talent should not go to waste.
Smarter from the Beginning?
Trailblazers like Soyeon Yi are helping change attitudes towards women in Korea. “All my friends were sure I couldn’t make it, because I was a woman,” she recalls about the selection process that saw 36,000 applicants whittled down to two—and then one, when Ko San, the male applicant originally chosen ahead of her, was disqualified for breaking the information secrecy rules of the Russian space program. Having shown that it was possible to come out on top, she regularly receives letters from girls, thanking her for showing them that “if you do your best, you can make it.”
Recently, it has been something of a trend among Korean men to feel that women are “taking over.” One look at the cabinet or the board of Samsung Electronics would tell them otherwise, but the men of this country have long harbored the suspicion that the women are in fact “much smarter than we are,” and given the chance, will end up turning the tables on them, as Cho Jin-won (not his real name), a senior Samsung manager, noted to the author only in half jest.
The usual evidence of superior female common sense is that, even in the days before women were able to compete in the job market, they were generally left in charge of household finance in the belief that this would lead to better results. Typically, men hand their salaries over to their wives, who give them an “allowance” in return. Decisions on the purchase of homes also tend to be made by women. Furthermore, a survey by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper in 2007 revealed that 65 percent of married Korean women have “secret funds” that their husbands are unaware of. Women may keep a stash for a multitude of purposes, both good and bad, but stories are legion of such rainy day funds being used to save families from financial disaster. A friend of the author says that when his father’s business went bankrupt, his mother produced a sum of money she had been hoarding for years, one large to enough to open up a restaurant. The hard work of both parents turned that one establishment into five, and the family is now well off again, thanks to his mother’s wise deception.
The Jeju Woman
While it is hard to deny that Korea has been a historically sexist country, important regional variations make stereotyping difficult. The province of Jeolla, for instance, has always offered women more of a say than the more conservative Gyeongsang Province has. According to architect Hwang Doo-jin, many Joseon-era homes in Jeolla had reception rooms where both the men and women of the house could greet guests. In Gyeongsang, only men had such rooms. However, the best place for women in Korea was always considered to be Jeju Island, located off the south coast of the mainland.
An independent society prior to its conquest by the Koryo dynasty and eventual absorption into Joseon Korea, Jeju to this day is home to a dialect that other Koreans find hard to understand. One Seoul resident calls Jeju people “only about 90 percent Korean” in the way they think and act. Probably the most obvious way the island’s culture differs from that of the mainland is in its traditional gender roles. Very often, a Jeju woman was the breadwinner of her family.
The iconic example of the Jeju woman, known to all Koreans, is the haenyeo, literally “sea woman.” These women dove to depths of around sixty feet to retrieve abalone and other valuable sea creatures to sell at the market, while their husbands would traditionally stay home and look after the children. This culture was particularly vibrant on the small island of Mara (about five miles off the south coast of Jeju), where the economy was almost entirely dependent upon haenyeo. It cannot be said that women had power over men in Jeju—men still dominated political affairs, for instance—but as breadwinners they played an indispensable social role and were respected accordingly.
Paradoxically, encroaching modernity has reduced the economic status of Jeju women in recent years. The island is no longer remote. In fact, it is a tourist destination for Seoul dwellers, who can arrive via Gimpo airport in just one hour. The growth of tourism has resulted in the development of more classically male-dominated businesses like hotels, often run by large mainland Korean corporations, in which women are generally employed to clean rooms or sit at the front desk and smile. Furthermore, the typical haenyeo is now over fifty, and her daughter is not following in her footsteps.
Discrimination Is Going—But How Quickly?
Though sexism was undeniably prevalent in Korea, it was not uniform or simple—as the cases of female control of family finances and the economic power of Jeju women would attest. And as we have seen, times are changing, at least for young people. Women like Soyeon Yi are benefiting from this change already, but, when their own daughters are ready to enter the workforce, how equal will society be? If equality is increasing, the speed of that increase may be more important than anything else, and for the same reason we have seen in previous sections: this country is facing a demographic crisis.
South Korea is expected to become a “super-aged society” by 2026, with 23 percent of its population over the age of sixty-five. This is because of two separate factors. The first is a positive one—life expectancy is now beyond 80 years and rising. We can thus expect Korea’s baby boom generation of the late 1950s and 1960s to live long lives. The second is the fact that Korean women now only have 1.2 children, on average, over the course of their lifetimes. In the late 1950s, they had more than six.
By the late 2020s and 2030s, a chart showing population numbers by age will look like an inverted pyramid, with large numbers of old people at the top, and fewer young people at the bottom. Economists talk of a “demographic dividend” when there is a preponderance of young people out working and paying taxes and relatively few old people for society to support. When the opposite becomes true, the result is an economic nightmare. With almost one in four people beyond working age and requiring pension payments and greater healthcare expenditure, the burden on wage-earning taxpayers—of whom there will be fewer than before—will be vast. Korea’s maximum GDP growth rate will be just 1.7 percent per year by 2030, and by some estimates Korea’s national pension fund, currently the fourth largest in the world with assets of over US$300 billion, will be completely depleted by 2040.
To increase tax receipts in order to pay for the growing legions of senior citizens, the 39 percent of university-educated women who do not work need to be coaxed back into the office. Some may have conservative husbands who discourage them from working, but the main problem stems from the lack of support for working mothers and the gender pay gap, which at 35 percent, is the highest in the OECD. These serve as disincentives and the result is a so-called M-curve pattern, in which young women begin working after school or college, give up after having children, then return to work after their children grow up, but in low-paid, low value-added jobs.
The right policies should lead to an increase in the female labor participation rate, and that would actually lead to a higher birth rate. The main cause of Korea’s low birth rate is the shocking cost of raising children. Raising one child in Korea costs an average total of 260 million won (around US$230,000) according to the Korea Institute of Health and Social Affairs. This is a conservative figure: the Korea Labor Institute claims that the cost is actually over 400 million won. Outside of the wealthy, single-income couples are unable to afford this. If a couple wants two children, both of them have to work.
The examples of the U.K. and Sweden demonstrate that when generous maternity and paternity leave is offered and accepted, high rates of female labor participation and much higher birth rates (2 per woman in the UK, 1.9 in Sweden), result. In Korea, maternity leave is too short, and workplace pressure results in women not taking all of it. Paternity leave of five days is a legal right, but few men would actually go to their boss and demand it. A 2005 report by the OECD argues that better childcare policies (and genuine implementation of them) would result in an increase in the birth rate of 0.4 in South Korea, shifting it up to around 1.6 children per woman.
Since 2001, when the first maternity leave legislation was introduced, successive governments have been well aware of this logic, and some improvements have been made. There are now childcare vouchers for low-income families, for instance, and more than three hundred laws have been changed since 2005 with the specific purpose of increasing gender equality.
Killing the M-Curve
The current generation of young women holds the key to South Korea’s economic future. They have access to education and work opportunities in an (almost) equal fashion to men in many areas. Women just ten years older than them sit at home or work in low-paid part-time jobs, prisoners of the M-curve. The question is, will increasingly positive social attitudes towards working women and policies aimed at supporting them be enough to help today’s twenty-three-year-old college graduate a decade from now, when she contemplates having children? Will the M-curve level out enough to allow South Korea to support its elderly and increase its birth rate at the same time?
There are two reasons that lead to hope. The first is that a majority of policymakers as well as citizens in general are well aware of the urgency of solving Korea’s aging society problem. 91 percent of Koreans consider the low birthrate issue very serious, according to a survey by the Korean health ministry in 2012. Sexism is not likely to be an obstacle to change either, as men themselves are no longer against the expansion of opportunities for women. The Pew Research Center has found that only 8 percent of Korean men are now against gender equality.
The second reason is simple market efficiency, as Dr. Yi points out. 50 percent of human talent is held by women, and people now finally realize this. Thus, the nation’s four largest financial companies, the titans of an industry long considered a bastion of sexism, selected women for 52 percent of new management jobs in 2007. Such positions, which typically take seven to ten years of experience to attain, would not have been awarded to women in the past because of the belief that they would have to quit to start families. Precious few directors at these companies today are women, but within ten years, there will be many.
Cultural critics who are fond of painting Korea as a sexist country still make a valid point. Indeed, the media in this country is particularly regressive in the way it portrays women, as either helpless or overly sexualized objects. However, when the need is great enough, Koreans display a willingness and ability to be flexible, and that is a social trait that trumps this and many other problems. We are already seeing evidence of Koreans’ ability to change under pressure with regard to the new opportunities being created for women. This is also partly why the traditional xenophobia is disappearing. More and more foreign workers as well as more women workers are needed to beat the demographic burden of a super-aged society.