Korean Public Service Jobs -Where Women Outnumber Men-

Comments: Seems like there is some truth to the comic character"WONDER WOMAN". Women are probably world class jugglers and we leave men wondering how do we do it all. Better find ways to do things more productively to turbo charge our lives!

Read on..

Where women outnumber men -- Govt bid to boost their role in society
05:55 AM Mar 03, 2010

SEOUL - When Ms Kim Hyo Eun joined the South Korean Foreign Ministry in 1992, its personal data form listed "wife" but not "husband" in the section where new diplomats provided information about their spouses.That was hardly surprising: At the time, few women had taken, let alone passed, the foreign service examination.Fast forward to this year andMs Kim is now director of the ministry's climate change team. There has also been a change in the face of South Korean diplomacy.

Over the past five years, 55 per cent of the 151 people who passed the highly competitive test - the main passageway into the country's diplomatic corps - were women.The situation at the Foreign Ministry is emblematic of what is happening in other government departments.Last year, 47 per cent of those who passed the state examination that selects mid-level officials to be groomed for senior posts in agencies other than the Foreign Ministry were women.

In 1992, it was 3.2 per cent.So many women have entered public service in recent years that, in 2003, the government revised its quota system.In 1996 it had begun mandating that at least 30 per cent of new hires in all government departments, except the police and military, be women. Now, because so many women have succeeded in competing for these jobs, it is applying the minimum 30 per cent quota for men as well.The recent surge of women in the public sector is an outcome of government efforts to expand democracy after decades of military rule.It also seeks to combat economic stagnation by bringing more well-educated women into the paid work force and to check the country's plummeting birthrate, which has been attributed in part to the difficulties South Korean women face trying to combine careers and motherhood.

But it also reflects the obstacles women continue to face in the private sector.In South Korea, the four largest conglomerates - Samsung, Hyundai, LG and SK - dominate the economy. Women hold less than 2 per cent of seats on their boards. There are almost no female executives in South Korean banks.Despite having the world's 13th-largest economy, South Korea ranked 115th out of 134 countries in last year's World Economic Forum index of gender equality.

Highly-educated women are poorly represented in the paid work force, where tradition continues to give married women overriding responsibility for managing the household and raising children."The biggest merit of government jobs for women is that we don't face discrimination there," said Ms Park Ja Hye, a graduate who has been preparing for the foreign service exam. "Private companies don't have great expectations from their female employees. They seem to hire them just for display, to show that they care about gender equality."

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Women Here Doing Better in Workforce

Women here doing better in workforce
by Pamela Chow(MyPaper March 3,2010)

MANAGING director Joni Ong, 49, is feeling upbeat about her finances, her independence and, indeed, about her place as a woman in Singapore's working world.As a young graduate, she had ambitions of climbing the corporate ladder but, at 27, her plans took a back seat after she and her husband started their family.Eight months after giving birth, she went on to take her master's degree in Education and continued to make progress in the field of human resource.

"Women are very much a presence to be reckoned with... We've always been able to make decisions for ourselves," she said.She continues to feels positive about the economy, even in the wake of the financial crisis, and recently started a training consultancy."This is the year to start... It's time to move forward," she said.Ms Ong is just one example of a Singapore woman who feels she's on solid ground, just a year after the global economic meltdown.The MasterCard Worldwide Index of Women's Advancement 2010, a biannual survey that measures consumer confidence amid prevailing market expectations, studied a total of 3,306 women and 3,316 men in the region.The survey compiles an index to compare whether expectations of economic performance favour men or women.A figure of 100 indicates equality between the sexes.Numbers less than that mean that expectations favour men, while numbers higher than 100 indicate that expectations favour women.

The index, which surveyed 200 women and 200 men in Singapore, shows that:

• Women here form 51.3 per cent of the labour force, up from 51.1 per cent last year.
• Women's regular income has also improved against men's, doubling from 34.9 to 68.9 index points, from the first to second half of last year.
• Singapore women's expectations of future economic performance have also gone up, from 31.4 index points to 86.5 over the same period.
• More women are also taking charge in the household.
• Throughout the region, an estimated 66.5 per cent of women are taking on the role of decision-makers, up from 45.6 per cent last year.

Women continue to make strides in labour-force participation and tertiary- education enrolment, and we are glad to see this translating into a greater sense of self-worth," Ms Georgette Tan, MasterCard's vice-president of communications for the Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, said in a statement.

The survey also received responses from people in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.