0207-For more female workers

At stake is how to create women-friendly workplaces                                        

Korean women’s college entrance rates exceeded that of men in 2009. But the female employment rate still lags behind males by 15 percentage points overall, and by 25 percentage points among workers in their 30s, the most productive age band.

Predictably, the main culprit in this male-dominated society is the heavy burden of bearing and rearing children as well as endless housework almost one-sidedly placed on the shoulders of wives and mothers.

Yet keeping women, especially those with higher education, at home is an unjustifiable waste of the workforce, and an unforgivable drag on growth.

The government is right in this regard to push for a policy aimed at jacking up women’s labor force participation rate by minimizing career disruptions. It also befits an administration led by the nation’s first female president, who pledged to increase the overall employment rate to 70 percent, by sharply reducing the number of women forced to stop work.  

An interagency program, unveiled Tuesday, is also going in the proper direction by vowing to increase financial incentives for firms to allow their employees to have parental leave more freely, introduce flexible work systems, and provide more, and better, daycare facilities. If these measures bear fruit and raise the women’s employment rate as desired, the additional spending of about 1 trillion won will be cheap at the price.

In reality, however, good intentions do not always produce good results.

Considering a majority of women work at small- and medium-sized enterprises hiring 100 or fewer workers, taking a maternity leave, especially for the second time, is very difficult. Husbands who take out paternal leave in those firms receive suspicious, even ridiculing, treatment. The situation is not far better in larger companies. All this explains why the nation’s top female talent become government employees or knock on the doors of foreign-invested firms.  

This means the government will need to come up with far more carrots and sticks. It ought to provide far bolder incentives for the companies which make no gender-based discrimination in pay and working conditions, while more harshly discipline those which demand pregnant employees quit. At stake is how to create female- and family-friendly workplaces, and change the social culture and popular awareness. President Park Geun-hye will leave a lasting legacy if she manages to introduce a female-friendly corporate certificate system, as the government has done to enhance businesses’ consciousness about environment.

It is regrettable in this vein the latest government policy is lacking in more fundamental steps toward that end, by, for instance, trying to narrow the still wide wage gap between men and women doing similar work, turning more of the women on non-permanent payroll into regular workers, and allowing them to return to the same workplaces and jobs after spending maternity leaves, instead of letting them fall to less-paying, simple works.

In this era of services industries and a feminized workforce when brain power, not brute force, matters, nations that make the most of womanpower will win. Korea, a notoriously macho society, is at a great disadvantage in this regard. That in turn shows why the government cannot do with just the "me-too” policy.