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