The Difficulties of Korean Women in Having a Career

Ch'a Ko-un, So' U'i-jo'ng, Chung Ho-wo'n

I once overheard a conversation between a boy and a girl who were playing house. They were fighting over who should be the one working outside. The boy insisted that he should be the one, because his mom told him boys were not supposed to stay at home doing housework. These kinds or stereotyped roles of men and women were built and are being built through formal education and is acknowledged as natural in the people's minds. This is especially so in Korea. Korea women find it difficult to have a career because Korean education has adversely influenced women's situation at home and in the workplace.

Our past and present education has built a kind of prejudice against women. The education done in the past, especially in the Cho-sun dynasty, was based on Confucianism. Confucianism supported the thought that men and women had their fixed roles. The man was referred to as the 'outside person' and the woman was referred to as the 'inside person', according to where they usually had to spend their time. Confucianism also insisted on a hierarchical society and men and women were placed in a different class. In the five cardinal articles of morality, which are the basic rules of Confucianism, there is an article called 'Boo-Boo-You-Byul'. This article says that husband and wife should be treated differently. In other words, it means that women and men are of a different class - men in the higher class and women in the lower one. These thoughts were engraved on the students' minds and has been passed down ever since. Like the education of the past, education of today also has the sense of discrimination. In the textbooks used today, a clear line is drawn between what is called 'a man's job' and 'a woman's job'. According to the research done by the Korea Female Development Institute, 73.0% of the male characters that come out in the elementary school textbooks all had jobs, while 77.3% of the female characters were all described as housewives. If both the male and female characters were given jobs, the outgoing jobs were given to men and women were only given what's thought as female jobs such as nurses. Also the teacher's attitude toward the students has an influence in building prejudice. Teachers praise boys with active words like 'healthy, outgoing and smart', while girls are praised with words such as 'quiet, pretty and woman-like'. This kind of attitude leads students to take these stereotyped figures of men and women as natural. The past and present education is a major factor in making people take prejudice for granted.

This prejudice caused by traditional education saddles women with too many responsibilities. Korean women are having difficulties in having a career because of household affairs and raising children at home. Women are responsible for those things because of the prejudice built from the education. Married women spend much their time on household affairs. According to the National Statistics Office, women spend about an average 6 hours a day. More and more time women spend on doing house work, they are not able to have enough time to develop business abilities in the work field. One reason women spend so much time on housework is that other family members hardly help at home. In the report on statistics survey from the National Statistical Office, it sats that a husband takes the house work an hour a day, a daughter two hours, a son 40 minutes on the average. But the alloted work is concentrated on holidays, so consequently women do between 90 and 95 percent of the entire house work. As for raising children, it is much more difficult to share responsibility for it. It's regarded as a mother's responsibility to take care of children because traditionally there is a fixed sexual role about women in Korea. Even though there are some day care facilities, women try to raise their children themselves because people think it is a kind of women's virtue. Research And Research shows that another reason that responsibilities are not shared is the superwomen complex, which compels a women to take on the duties of career, good wife, and devoted mother. So she can't give herself to the career. If women become more free at home, they have less problems in having a career.

In addition to difficulties at home, the prejudice that exists in the society is creating a difficult situation for women in the workplace. One of the difficulties they face is discrimination. The prejudiced superiors in companies think that women can't work better than men, although men and women entered the company with the same qualifications. Men are also promoted faster than women. The Korean Education Development Center said that the number of women holding the rank of section chief or above was merely 0.9 percent. And women's pay is also lower than men's. Even if a woman does the same job as a man and even does it better, she stays at least one step behind the man. According to the statistics given from the Korean Education Development Center, there was an overall difference of 59.6 percent between a man's salary rate and a woman's in 1997. This discrimination in promotion and salary emphasizes the notion of women's lack of ability and reinforces the common idea that women have no sense of responsibility about a job. In addition to slow promotion and low pay, biology causes problems for women. One problem is the disadvantage caused by marriage and pregnancy. Although the law for equality in men and women's employment says that the business proprietor should not make a labor contract which fires women because of their marriage, pregnancy or child birth, 27.6 percent of the women complained that their rights were violated. Another problem is sexual harassment. The Sexual Abuse Advice Center in Seoul said that the number of people wanting counselling on sexual abuse increased by twice the amount of last year. The percentage of women suffering from sexual harassment was 75.48 and the instance of rape among women was 16.98. Problems related to pay, promotion and biology not only make it harder for women to start having a career but also make it difficult for them to keep their jobs.

Confucism philosophy taught in the past is still alive in the present education and this has a big influence in generating the thought that women and men have different roles. Household affairs are still taught to be only a woman's job and because of this, women have little time to invest in their careers. And those who do have careers are treated unequally with men is the workplace. This is all the result of the prejudice passed down by education, and if there is no change in education, it is expected to continue in being a barrier in women's careers.