How global feminism impacts women’s rights in South Korea.
The first wave of feminism started in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emerging out of urban industrial and liberal, socialist politics. The goal of the surge was to offer opportunities for women, with a focus on voting. The wave formally began in Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, with three hundred men and women protested to the cause of equality for women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Seneca Falls Declaration outlining the new movement’s ideology and political strategies (Young, 2000).
In the early stages, feminism was intertwined with the abolitionist movements and gave voice to now-famous activists like the African-American Sojourner Truth, who demanded: Aren’t I a woman? Victorian America showed women acting in very un-ladylike ways, which challenged the cult of domesticity. It was about the vote, and women’s participation in politics led to examining the difference between men and women as they were then seen. Some argued that women were morally superior to men, so their civic sphere would increase public behavior and political processes (Hernes, 1987).
The second wave of feminism began in the 1960s through the 90s. This wave began in the context of the anti-war and civil rights movements and the growing self-consciousness of various minority groups worldwide. The New Left was on the rise, as well as second wave was increasingly radical. In this period, sexuality and reproductive rights were the dominant issues. Much of the movement’s energy focused on passing the Constitution’s Equal Rights Amendment, promoting social equality regardless of sex. This phase started with protests towards the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in 1968 and 1969. Feminists parodied what they held to be a degraded cattle parade that decreased women to objects of beauty controlled by a patriarchy that sought to maintain them in the home or dull, low paying-job. The radical New York group called the Restocking staged a counter pageant. They crowned a sheep as Miss America and threw feminine objects such as bras, girdles, high-heels, makeup, and false eyelashes into the trashcan (Hernes, 1987) .
As second-wave feminism found its voice amid so many other social movements, it was easily marginalized. It is viewed as less pressing than, for example, Black Power of efforts to end the war in Vietnam. Feminists react by forming only organizations and consciousness-raising groups. The second wave was theoretical, based on a fusion of neo-marxism and psycho-analytical theory, and started to associate the subjugation of women with wider critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, normative heterosexuality, and the women’s role wife and mother. Sex and gender were differentiated- the former being biological and a later social construct that varies from culture to culture and over time. The third wave of feminism occurred during the mid- 90s and was provided by post-colonial and post-modern thinking. In this phase, many constructs were destabilized and the notion of universal womanhood, body, gender, sexuality, and heteronormativity. An aspect of third-wave feminism that the mothers of the earlier feminist movement were the re-adoption by young feminists of the very lip-sticks, high-heels, and cleavage proudly exposed by low cut necklines that the first two phases of the activity identified with male oppression. Pinnkfloor expressed this new position when she said it’s possible to have a push-up bra and a brain simultaneously (Young, 2000) .
The “third wave started onto the stage as strand and empowered eschewing victimization and illustrating feminine beauty for known as subjects, not as objects of the sexiest patriarchy. It allows all users the opportunity to cross-gender stereotypes, and so the very notion of gender has been unbalanced in a way that recommends experiment and creative thought. This is in maintaining with the third wave’s beauty of ambiguity and refusal to believe in terms of us. Most third wavers refuse to identify as feminists and reject the word that they find limiting and exclusionary. Feminism tends to be global, multicultural, and it shuns simple answers or artificial categories of identity, gender, and sexuality. Transversal politics means that differences such as ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, etc., are celebrated as dynamic, situational, and provisional. Reality is conceived not so much in fixed structures and power relations but terms of temporary. Reality is created not in terms of improved systems and power relations but performance within contingencies. Third-wave feminism destroys stereotypes (Hernes 1987) .
The fourth wave of feminism is still a captivating silhouette. An editor for Elle Magazine wrote about the waves of feminism as the social and economic gains had primarily been sparkle, little substances, and whether some point, women substituted equal rights for career and atomic self. Problems like sexual abuse, rape, violence towards women, unequal pay, slut-shaming, the pressure on women to conform to a single and unrealistic body type, and the realization that gains in female representation in politics and business are examples are very slight. It is considered not “extreme,” nor is it known the purview of rarified intellectuals to discuss societal abuse of women, rape on college women (Young, 2000).
For over a century, South Korea has lingered near the bottom of critical international measurements for equality like the Global Gender Gap Index. This is understandable considering the country’s three decades of military rule, the early 1960s to the late 1980s when women suffered substantial systemic discrimination. For example, women were disabled in hiring systems designed to reward men for compulsory military service and fired anyway when they married or became pregnant. During the military dictatorship, women were discouraged from being involved within workplace unions, and when they did, often the secret police got involved. However, From the end of military rule in the late 1980s, democratization was a process actively shaped by women and men. It might have been expected to have delivered more significant gains to half of the population. The fact the payments have been so slow to arrive is disturbing. The only way to account for such immense inertia on the status of women is to recognize how central gender discrimination has been in South Korea’s model of economic development, even under democracy. Women’s subordinate position in the labor market and social life is crucial to understanding modern South Korea today.
In the years since the military rule, it may appear that substantive gains have been made for women in the workforce. The December 1987 Equal Employment Act demanded equal opportunity for women in the workplace in hiring, promotion, and wages. However, equal employment was not achievable until the Constitutional Court’s 1999 ruling that the military service bonus point system which favored men was discriminatory. By that time, South Korea had been struck by the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. The bailout offered with the IMF carried strict conditions on repayment and corporate restructuring a massive bailout was offered. In the sex-segregated labor market, where women were not considered family breadwinners, female employees were dismissed. The most notorious example was at Hyundai Motor Company in Ulsan. In 1998, a deal was finalized between management and unions, and the whole kitchen canteen staff, all middle-aged women, were faced with the layoff quota. The restructuring of industries and the normalization of flexible, more precarious contracts as part of the IMF bailout permanently changed South Korea’s employment system.
On 17th May 2016, a man loitered in the public toilets at Gangnam Station, waiting for the next woman to enter, then stabbed her to death. CCTV footage indicated that six men used it while the man waited in the bathroom, but he struck only when a woman arrived. After his arrest, the assailant argued his crime by saying that although the woman was a stranger to him, he generally had deep resentment against women. The public outcry was significant when the police and media said the crime was driven by mental illness rather than a hate crime towards women. Overnight, Gangnam station became a public memorial covered in messages of solidarity and mourning for the victim. The Gangnam case differed from reporting violent crimes against women, which had previously minimized the motives or even expressed sympathy for the assailant. In South Korea, the public memorial at Gangnam Station, visited by thousands, was archived by the city and preserved in Seoul City Hall in a permanent expression of mourning and change (Rampton, 2019).
Feminism in South Korea is today experience a second renaissance. The push for a comprehensive analysis of systemic barriers impeding the flourishing and advancement of women have begun redefining society’s notion of democracy, equality, and prosperity. Feminism itself has become more substantive as networks of mutual support are established with the LGBTI community in Korea and multicultural families. Many of the issues identified here are shared with other OECD nations. In South Korea, feminism’s changed from defensive activism and to dynamic analysis and dismantling law enforcement, media, culture, and politics.
In the article “Why so many young men in South Korea hate feminism” in many countries, young voters are assumed to lean toward progressive. Until recently, that was also the fact in South Korea. But in the last few years, young male South Korean voters had a rightward turn. In the Seoul mayoral by-election held in April, an overwhelming 72.5% of male voters in their 20s voted conservative, a proportion higher than male voters in their 60s and older. Fueled by aggressive misogyny and distorted worship of supposed meritocracy, young Korean men create an ominous new chapter in South Korea’s right-wing politics, especially as new conservative party leaders echo misogynist rhetoric. Youth unemployment is one reason for the resentment towards the left. Overall, the Moon administration has maintained an unemployment rate of 4 percent. But unemployment for under the 30s, which was between 7-8% in the 2000s, began to climb to more than 9% in 2014 and has remained at around that level to this day. But the economic factor does not show why there is such a giant gender gap, even though the stricter job market affects young women more than young men. South Korea’s experts have focused on this issue to two tendencies among Korean men: worship of the idea of meritocracy and misogyny. Young South Koreans, born in the 1990s when South Korea was well into a prosperous, progressive democracy, have little sense of the historical difficulties that defined the older generations, such as the Korean War or the battle against military dictators for democracy. Instead, straggle is with a series of examinations: entrance exams for high schools, colleges, and high-paying, secure jobs. This generation has spent most of their lives taking or preparing for exams in the infamously grueling hagwon or cram school system. As a result, younger South Koreans have internalized the logic of those exams and elevated it into a type of loss of moral sensibility, where the poor are to blame for their suffering. If older Korean men see themselves as patriarchs who look down on women, younger Korean men see themselves as victims of feminism. It showed young men rejected both male privilege and the duty that typically comes with the patriarchal form of sexism. Instead, the survey indicated their version of sexism was marked by over-the-top hostility against feminism. 58.6% of Korean men in their 20s said they strongly opposed feminism (Hwang, 2019) .
The interplay between worshipping meritocracy and misogyny of South Korean men in their 20s gives a more precise explanation of the gender gap in the timing of the younger generation’s right-wing turn. Korean women still face massive amounts of discrimination; as an example, a recent survey by the Economist put South Korea in the last place in the glass-ceiling index, which describes the gender gap in education, wage, and managerial positions. Tet Korea’s young women have been rising steadily gains in recent years. The proportion of women completing college, for example, has been higher than the same proportion of men since 2009. Educated young women have been brought into South Korea’s feminist movement, culminating with Korea’s me too activity in early 2018, sparked by Seo-Ji-Hyeon, a woman prosecutor who blew the whistle on the sexual harassment she suffered the hands of a senior prosecutor. Some young women create fun of misogynistic men personally, such as by using a hand emoji that mocks the size of their genitals. The anti-feminist jargon constructed by conservative leader Lee Jun Seok, whom Park views as the political champion of radical young men, is indebted to the proliferation of the myth that the revolutionary movements are intrinsical with feminism.
The work-family balance policy is one of the essential policy successes of the gender equality forms examined in the previous section. However, this policy also supports the family lives of workers by reducing the long working hours in Korea. Does this policy help reduce the gender gap in Korea’s labor market and revise the gender segregation problem in the labor market? Two things need to be taken into account here. The first is the question of the extent to which women benefit from the Work-Family balance policy, including child-rearing leave, since this depends on their position in the labor market. Korea’s social insurance system is designed to benefit workers in stable sources of income who can pay high amounts of insurance premiums over a long period and is thus insufficient to enable effective redistribution. This is the same for the maturity leave system, which is operated with the funds from the Employment Insurance. People who enter high rungs of the labor market are better positioned to enjoy the benefits of the work-family Balance Policy. At the same time, low-income workers with temporary jobs suffer from small incomes and have limited access to such policy. Korea’s work-family balance policy assumes working women will take on the prominent role in raising their children rather than restructuring the gender-based division of labor within paid labor and caregiving labor. While it is difficult for women to use vacation days for childbirth or child-rearing, women who take time off work find it hard to return to their original jobs.
According to results from recent research that analyzed employment and health insurance, more than three out of 10 working women who sued maturity leave in 2015 left their jobs within a year of returning, and one out of four working women left their original jobs within one week of returning. While higher leave allowances helped increase take-up rates from working women, percentages of women who cannot return to work or are soon quitting after returning result remain high. In other words, given that married women typically transition to marginal jobs after childbirth, the Work-Balance Policy may end up becoming a route for women to leave the labor market (Barraclough, 2021).
Several studies suggest that time pressures and time poverty differ according to gender. Research that has analyzed data concerning the use of time in daily life has found that despite the increase in the number of women obtaining paid jobs, male participation in household work has not changed very much. Working women are, in essence, faced with the double burden of having to conduct both household labor and paid labor. Dual-earner couples who have a young child have to spend most f their time in the course of a 24-hour day focused on paid delivery, and the proportion of time spent on leisure is deficient. Even full-time, dual-earner households generally have the woman spending most of the time watching the child. As this shows, working parents who have young children feel much more pressure than other types of parents, and even within dual-earner households the woman experiences much more scarcity in terms of leisure and sleep time compared to the men—running after time, cutting down on relaxation time compared to the men. Running after time, cutting down on leisure activity or sleep time are typical features of mothers’ busy lives, leading them to exhaustion (Hwang, 2019).
Working women are always busy due to their responsibilities for caregiving and child-raising, and they constantly cope with multiple tasks in daily life. White-collar working women compress their time to complete all of the conflicting daily functions within the demands of their professional and family lives, all the while saying that time appears the more it’s divided up.
Anti-feminist feelings in Korea are generally thought to have started with the 1999 ruling that the military reward system was unconstitutional. Young men who experience pressure due to increased job competition felt a sense of deprivation after dismantling the reward system and expressed discontent that they were receiving reverse discrimination. The effort’s to make the reward system unconstitutional was led by the women’s movement and was considered a critical success of gender equality reform. On online discourse concerning the ruling, feminists were viewed as pursuing power at the expense of men. The discontent and sense of deprivation felt by Korean men were expressed by a series of satires that degraded women on the Internet around 2005. The misogyny that has permeated the Internet conveys the young male generation’s sense of failure and anger, but that is only one factor at play here. The insults and language of hatred unique to the online community are an expression of the culture of amusement. Othering women through misogyny is a part of how men form bonds and socialize with each other. The hatred toward women and men’s feelings of victimhood have spread online on the outskirts of public discourse and the democratic system and have weakened widespread sympathy for gender equality (Spencer, 2019).
The public feminism of the women’s movement that led the gender equality reforms must move beyond the “fast-track strategy” that uses the state as a tool. It must advocate a universal political plan that creates a more democratic community. Moreover, the identity politics expressed outside the institutional reform space demands the actualization of more equal lives and gender justice in daily lives and culture and exposes the exclusion and gender blindness inherent in democracy. There is a need to seriously consider gender as a universal issue of democracy to break through the limits faced by democracy post-democratization. Democracy without gender cannot become an alternative for the new democracy (Spencer, 2019).
The challenge that women face in the workforce is not confined to Japan. Both South Korea and Japan regularly ranked poorly in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap report, most recently marking 115,110 respectively. From the World Economic Forum, South Korea scores 124 out of 149 countries globally regarding economic participation and opportunity for women.
In South Korea, women face questions about their marriage status and plans for having children when signing up for a job or suggestions that jobs in fields such as sales aren’t fit for women. These arguments and scrutiny of their appearance are illegal in South Korea, but significant firms often face minimal fines for abuse towards women. When KB Kookmin Bank was found guilty of discriminating towards female job candidates, it was only fined $4,500. Some of the human resource teams were given suspended prison sentences (Barraclough, 2021).
South Korea ranks the lowest in the Economist’s annual Glass Ceiling Index. It shows that among OECD countries, South Korea has the most significant pay gap at 35%. The OECD pay gap is 13.8%. The glass ceiling extends to corporate boards. Only 2% of South Korean firms’ corporate board of directors are female. Women hold only ten managerial positions in South Korea. When women at work have children, they often face pressure to resign from their jobs, or if they return to work, face a future with lower pay as many are often forced to take part-time work rather than return to full-time positions (Spencer, 2019) .
In government, the circumstances are similar. Women only make up 17% of the members of the parliament—South Korea is sixth from the bottom in the OECD. With female ministers in government, South Korea has the third-lowest percentage in the OECD. In contrast, women include the majority of ministers in the Macron government in France. While the Moon administration has sought to introduce the gender gap in government, it has set modest goals: women consist for 10 percent of senior government positions and 20% of public firm executives by 2022. Beyond the toll on women in the community, the failure to integrate women into the workforce has long-term economic implications for South Korea. While South Korea’s overall population is growing, it is expected to begin declining as soon as 2028. South Korea’s working-age population has already started to decrease. With the fertility rate falling below one for the first time in 2018, there seems no sign of a shift to having more children. Based on the estimates, South Korea’s working-age population could decline by 7.5 million people between today 2040. According to a recent estimate, the resulting decline in South Korea’s working-age population could push South Korea’s potential growth rate as low as 1 percent by 2030 (Barraclough, 2021) .
One solution would be to integrate women into the workforce better. Since 1990, female involvement in the labor force increased from 47 percent of working-age females to 52.8 percent in 2018. Over the same period, male participation in the labor force increased from 64 to 72 percent.
According to the IMF, South Korea could boost labor force participation to the level of male labor force participation until 2035; it would increase real GDP growth by 7%. This is not a considerable amount, as it is roughly equal to what South Korea spends on health care.
The Korean government focuses efforts on 5G, big data, and other fields directed to AI. The number of AI patents in South Korean firms has grown significantly since 2004. Although the government’s heavy investment, a UNESCO study found that South Korean women consist of 18 percent of researchers, in contrast to 52% in the Philipines and Thailand and 10% engineers. Female graduates in computer science have declined since 2000.
The Moon administration has started to reduce the disincentive for companies to employ women. It has extended paid parental leave, made it easier for both parents to take leave simultaneously, and incentivized companies to allow both parents to work reduced hours. It has also taken steps to expand after-school care while reducing maximum hours worked in a week to 52 hours will help working parents (Stangarone, 2019).
Beyond the Moon administration’s steps, South Korea could move toward a blind application and increase fines on companies that discriminate against women in the hiring process as South Korea’s population declines; decreasing the gender gap in South Korea is significantly crucial for social and economic reasons. Beyond the lost GDP growth, gender inequality makes dealing with social challenges such as South Korea’s old-age poverty more challenging and limits South Korea’s ability to give economic aid to North Korea should it dismantle its weapons programs. While steps by the government to reduce the burden of childcare for working mothers and work flexibility will be necessary for drawing more women into the workforce, it will take time to change the social morales that have underpinned discrimination against women. However, as the IMF study shows, South Korea’s economic interest is to work toward greater gender parity (Stangarone, 2019).
References
Barraclough (2021). The Feminist Renaissance in South Korea, Australian Institute of International Affair.
Hwang, J (2019). Gendering Democracy after Domocratization in Korea Public Feminism and Politics of Identify, Journal of the Korean Welfare State and Social Policy, Vol,3 No.1 2019, 43-69
Hernes, H, M (1987). Welfare State and Women Power- Essays in State Feminism. London: Norwegian University Press
Rampton, M (2019) Four Waves of Feminism, Pacific University (Accessed 19th September 2021)
Spencer, H (2021) How Feminism Became a Dirty World in South Korea, The Diplomat (Assessed on 21st September 2021)
Stangarone, T (2019) Gender Inequality Makes South Korea Poorer, The Diplomat (Assessed on 21st September 2021)
Young, M (2000). Inclusion and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.
