S. Korea has the largest gender wage gap among OECD member countries, which is a humiliating setback for South Korea which boisterously talked about its economy being on the fast track to joining the ranks of developed countries. Seeing the tallest bar representing South Korea’s gender pay gap in the OECD gender wage gap bar graph is pathetically funny. According to the OECD's survey with its 36 member countries, South Korea had a wage gap of 36.7 percent between men and women in 2014, more than twice as high as the OECD average of 15.6 percent. This indicates that when a man receives a wage of 1 million won, a woman receives a wage of 633,000 won on average. .

When Korean men and women grow up, they go through different rites of passage: mandatory military service and childbirth. Though we cannot say that mandatory military service and childbirth are equally toilsome, there is no doubt that both change their lives to a great degree.

Most of Korean men enter the workforce later than their female counterparts because of conscription. Taking a few years off their young, most productive years in their life to join the military is sad. Watching their female counterparts start their career early makes Korean men feel anxious and frustrated. Once Korean men have landed a job, Korean men will be forced to work overtime and become supermen in the workplace.

On the contrary, most of working women have to go through a career-break due to childbirth in this country. Pregnant female workers feel unnerved by their male counterparts moving up the corporate ladder while they are away for childbirth.

Working women in the 30s have to juggle work and child rearing, so they tend to change jobs or quit their job and become a stay at home mom.

Career breaks related to childbirth takes the credit for the widening gender wage gap in this country. The average wage of working women in their 40 and 50s is only half their male counterparts.

This is because they are more likely to work as a non-regular worker after their childbirth-related career break. According to Statistics Korea’s 2015 survey, women accounted for 54 percent of the nation’s total non-regular workforce and men 46 percent.

A year of maternity leave is legally guaranteed. When I was worried about my post-childbirth career, one of my seniors told me that she returned to work three month after childbirth.

Of course, it is your call. Physically, conventionally, legally speaking, women are more entitled than men to use maternity leave. However, not so many companies allow male workers to take paternity leave. If taking paternity leave put down deep roots in Korean society, I think, we could make a difference in this nation.

Gender ratio and gender wage gap in the Korean IT industry

How about the gender pay gap at Korean IT companies According to 2013 data released by the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI), the number of male workers in the sectors of publishing, television, film, broadcasting & communications and information services, has risen 101,000 while the number of female workers in the same sectors has shed 7,000 since 2004. The share of female workers in the sectors dropped approximately 5.1 percentage points to 25.7 percent from 30.9 percent in 2004. Those sectors turned out to have dragged their feet on tapping into the nation’s female workforce.

Choi Chung, a researcher at the ICT Industry Research Department at KISDI, wrote in his column: “According to surveys of developed countries, countries with high female employment rates tend to have higher childbirth rates. It offers some insight to S. Korea that has to address the issues of low childbirth rates and population aging by increasing female employment rates.”

According to IT news blog Bloter.net’s analysis of corporate data for the third quarter of 2015, posted on Dart (http://dart.fss.or.kr), male workers commanded much higher wages than their female counterparts.

Facebook and Microsoft pay men and women equally for similar work.

However, meaningful announcements were made by Major U.S. tech companies ahead of Equal Pay Day that fell on April 12. Facebook and Microsoft disclosed that they pay their male and female employees equally.

Facebook’s head of people Lori Goler posted to her Facebook timeline that men and women at the social network “earn the same.”

Kathleen Hogan, executive vice president of Human Resources at Microsoft, said in a blog post its female employees earn 99.8 cents for every dollar earned by men at the same job title and level.

When can S. Korea have companies like Facebook and Microsoft Unfortunately, the World Economic Forum believes it will be 118 years before women around the world can expect equal pay.

By Kim In-wook (inwookk@koreaittimes.com) 다른기사 보기