Gender Wage Gap Nobel Prize Awarded... But South Korea Remains Worst for 26 Years

Gender Wage Gap Nears Three Times the Member Country Average
Ranked First in Wage Gap for 26 Years Since Joining OECD

This year's Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Claudia Goldin, a 77-year-old American economist and professor at Harvard University, who has contributed to analyzing the root causes of deep-seated gender wage gaps in the labor market and seeking solutions. With Professor Goldin's award, the issue of the gender wage gap has once again become a topic of discussion in South Korea.

In particular, experts point out that since South Korea has maintained the highest gender wage gap ranking for 26 years since joining the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1996, practical measures to reduce this gap are necessary.

This year's Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Claudia Goldin, a 77-year-old American economist and professor at Harvard University, who has contributed to analyzing the root causes of deep-seated gender wage gaps in the labor market and seeking solutions. With Professor Goldin's award, the issue of the gender wage gap has once again become a topic of discussion in South Korea.
[Photo by Pixabay]

According to the OECD's announcement last year, South Korea's gender wage gap was 31.2%. The OECD calculates the gender wage gap based on how much less the median income of full-time female workers is compared to that of full-time male workers. A 31.2% wage gap means that while a male worker earns 1,000,000 won, a female worker earns only 688,000 won.

Since joining the OECD in 1996, South Korea has held the record for the largest gender wage gap. It has maintained the highest wage gap for 26 years. As of 2021, South Korea's gender wage gap (31.1%) is three times the average of 11.9% among the 38 OECD member countries.

The wage difference between men and women working in the same job and occupation was also among the highest in the world. According to the British scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour last year, South Korea's gender wage gap based on the same job was 18.8%, ranking second among the 15 major countries surveyed, following Japan.

Professor Goldin: "Change in Perceptions of Older Generations and Men Is Needed"

Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard University in the United States and the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics laureate, held a press conference on the 9th (local time) at the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the same day, the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Professor Goldin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics "for advancing our understanding of women's labor market outcomes." [Photo by AFP·Yonhap News]

Earlier, the Swedish Nobel Committee awarded Professor Goldin the Nobel Prize in Economics, recognizing her "contribution to advancing our understanding of women's participation in the labor market." Her award has served as an opportunity to raise awareness of the gender wage gap issue.

At the award commemorative press conference, she diagnosed the cause of South Korea's severe low birthrate problem as "Korean corporate culture failing to keep up with rapid social changes."

Furthermore, Professor Goldin suggested that changing the perceptions of older generations and men is necessary to solve the low birthrate problem. She emphasized, "(The low birthrate issue) is very complex and difficult to solve, and changes cannot happen quickly. We need to educate the older generations, especially those who can influence their sons more than their daughters." She stressed the need to change social and cultural perceptions through continuous education.

The problem is that the reduction in South Korea's gender wage gap remains slow. South Korea reduced the gap by only 5.5 percentage points (15.0%) over ten years, from 36.6% in 2011 to 31.1% in 2021. Compared to the OECD average, which reduced the gap by 2.0 percentage points (14.4%) from 13.9% to 11.9% during the same period, South Korea's decrease is not remarkable.

Last year, the gap even widened by 0.1 percentage points, solidifying South Korea's position as number one. In contrast, Japan, which ranked second overall in 2011, reduced its gap from 27.4% to 22.1% during the same period, dropping to fourth place.

In response to such criticism, the government plans to introduce a gender labor disclosure system that requires companies to publicly disclose gender data on key employment matters such as hiring, job categories, and wages to eliminate the gender wage gap.

The government also plans to gradually introduce the 'gender labor disclosure system' starting with public institutions as the first step toward the gender wage disclosure system. Key details include disclosing gender ratios from document screening to final selection in the hiring stage, gender ratios of employees, promoted employees, and parental leave users by department in the labor stage, and gender ratios of dismissed, early retired, and retired employees in the retirement stage.

This system is expected to be piloted in the public sector this year and later expanded to workplaces with 500 or more employees.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.