Female jobseekers look at recruitment notices during a job fair at a convention center in the southeastern city of Daegu on Sept. 2, 2022. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Sept. 6 (Korea Bizwire) — The employment rate for women exceeded the 60 percent mark for the first time last year, but the wage gap between genders still remains high, a government report showed Wednesday.
The employment index for women aged 15 to 64 reached 60 percent in 2022, up 7.3 percentage points from 2010, but 22.8 percent of them had low-paying jobs, nearly twofold the rate of men, according to data collected by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.
Some 46 percent of women held temporary jobs, 15.4 percentage points higher than the 30.6 percent of men working in non-regular positions, the data showed.
The gender pay gap also remained in place, with female salary workers receiving 70 percent of the hourly wage earned by their male counterparts.
In terms of monthly salaries, women received some 2.68 million won (US$ 2,009) in wages whereas men were paid 4.13 million won last year.
The number of women who experienced a career break reached over 1.39 million as of April last year, with some 17.2 percent of women saying they quit their jobs after marriage or for child rearing.
Women spent two hours and 17 minutes more on average doing household chores than men, but men spent roughly two hours more doing work or looking for a job in 2019.
Meanwhile, over 32,000 sexual abuse cases were reported in 2021, up 8.9 percent year-on-year, but the number of dating violence criminals declined by 7.7 percent during the same period with nearly 11,000 cases.
In a separate survey of 2,716 listed firms, the gender pay gap narrowed to 30.7 percent in 2022 from 38.1 percent a year earlier, the biggest decline since 2019, according to data disclosed by the gender ministry.
Men served an average of 11.9 years in listed companies and women served 8.9 years, with the difference in their career length marking 25.1 percent last year.
The gender wage gap in public institutions was reported as smaller than private companies at 25.2 percent, but the average number of years of employment for men was 31.5 percent longer than that of their female counterparts.
“The ministry will push to narrow the gap in the years of continuous employment, which is a major factor of the gender pay gap, by enforcing measures to prevent the career break, and support the entry into promising, quality work,” Gender Equality Minister Kim Hyun-sook said.
(Yonhap)
