Women earning a wage, salary reach almost 10 million in 2023, wage gap persists

A woman marches in central Seoul with a picket demanding a reduction in the gender wage gap. [YONHAP]

The number of female wage and salaried workers reached a record high of almost 10 million last year, though the wage gap between men and women remained the highest among advanced nations.

Women earning a wage or salary came in at 9.98 million in 2023, up 282,000 from a year earlier, according to Statistics Korea data on Tuesday, the most since the government agency started compiling relevant data in 1963.

They accounted for a record 45.7 percent of all wage and salaried workers in the country, compared to 45.1 percent a year earlier.

Among them, regular employees accounted for 68.7 percent, while temporary workers took up 28.1 percent. Day laborers accounted for 3.2 percent.

The number of self-employed women last year stood at 1.71 million, up 52,000 from a year earlier. While not the most on record, the proportion of women among the self-employed hit a high of 30.1 percent.

In a bid to pull more women into the workforce, the government is relaxing visa regulations for migrant domestic service workers. Korea will accept 100 such workers from the Philippines later this year for a six-month trial period.

A shortage of domestic service workers, which forces many women to give up on their careers, will shave an estimated 2.1 to 3.6 percent off Korea’s gross domestic product by 2042, according to data from the Bank of Korea last month.

Despite a growing female workforce, the wage gap between men and women stood at 31.2 percent as of 2022, according to a Statistics Korea report on the country’s sustainable development goals that was released last month.

It was the largest among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Korea was the only member country with a gender wage gap wider than 30 percent. The OECD average was 12.1 percent.

The proportion of women in managerial-level positions in the country was the second lowest at 14.6 percent, less than half of the average of 34.2 percent for the group's other member nations.

BY JIN MIN-JI [jin.minji@joongang.co.kr]