BCN-19,20,21 Jobs for the boys under fire in South Korea

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Jobs for the boys under fire in South Korea

SEOUL, Nov 14, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – In her year-long quest for a job, South
Korean college graduate Casey Lee has faced a barrage of personal and
contradictory questions.

“One company asked if I had a boyfriend and when I’d get married,” she
told AFP. “Another asked why I didn’t have a boyfriend and wondered if
someone like me who had no plan to get married soon was trustworthy enough or
had a personality issue.”

Women often struggle to find a foothold in South Korea’s male-dominated
corporate culture and a series of firms have now been caught allegedly using
sexist recruitment targets to keep it that way.

Lee’s first interviewer complained that women tended to quit their
positions once they had a child, while the other launched a tirade against
“irresponsible young women” like her — she is 25 and single — for
abandoning their responsibility to have children “for the country’s future”.

“I wanted to scream out loud, ‘I’m only here to get a job!'” she told AFP,
adding male applicants in the same group-interview sessions were rarely asked
similar questions.

Lee is still looking for work, despite a degree from Seokyeong university
in Seoul.

She is not an isolated case, and evidence points to some firms in the
world’s 11th-largest economy systematically discriminating against women.

Three of South Korea’s top four banks have been embroiled in accusations
they set ratios for male and female recruitment, lowering women’s test and
interview scores and raising men’s to hit the target.

A total of 18 executives have been charged or convicted, including the
chairman of Shinhan Financial Group, the country’s second-biggest lender.

And last week the Supreme Court upheld a four-year jail sentence given to
the former CEO of state-run Korea Gas Safety Corp (KGS) for offences
including bribery and violating equal opportunities laws.

Despite its economic and technological advances the South remains a
patriarchal society, and has one of the world’s thickest glass ceilings for
women.

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– ‘Undermining social trust’ –

Only 2.7 percent of the 15,000 top executives at the country’s 500 biggest
firms are female, a government survey showed last year.

At 36.7 percent, the South also has the widest gender pay gap among the
OECD club of advanced economies.

Jobs at state-run firms such as KGS are in high demand as they offer
lifetime employment, but on former CEO Park Ki-dong’s instructions seven
qualified women applicants were eliminated — including the top scorer among
the 31 finalists — and replaced by poorer-performing men.

Park “excluded women without legitimate reason by ordering his
subordinates to manipulate test scores… seriously undermining social
trust”, the Supreme Court said in its ruling.

Park claimed women would disrupt the firm’s operations by taking maternity
leave.

In the conservative South, many married women — whether working or not –
– are expected to take sole responsibility for household chores and
childcare, with the double burden seen as a major cause of the country’s
paltry birthrate, the lowest in the world.

With daycare centres lacking and the country’s working hours notoriously
long, many women quit their jobs after becoming mothers.

– Cashing in –

Recruitment is highly competitive at the best of times in the South, and
doubly so in potentially lucrative banking.

Cho Yong-Byoung, chairman of Shinhan Financial Group — the South’s
second-largest finance house — was charged two weeks ago with violating
equal opportunities laws for ordering subordinates to maintain a 3:1 ratio
between male and female recruits.

According to state regulators, number four KEB Hana Bank set a 4:1 target
for new hires in 2013 and ended up taking on 5.5 men for each woman. Without
discrimination the ratio would have been almost equal, officials said.

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Seven of its managers are on trial, one telling the court that the
company’s clients were mostly men and “feel more comfortable” with male staff
who can “smoke or drink more freely”.

But sentences can be token.

Three senior managers of KB Kookmin Bank — the country’s top lender —
were convicted last month of lowering test scores for 112 female applicants
and raising those of 113 men.
“The accused deserved criticism for changing the fate of many job
applicants and causing so great a sense of betrayal and despair in their
hearts,” the court said.

But the offenders’ personal responsibility was limited, it went on, as
they were simply “following social customs”.

The trio were given suspended jail terms and the bank fined a meagre five
million won ($4,500).

“South Korean women are fighting on an extremely unequal playing field
that doesn’t seem to have changed for decades,” Bae Jin-kyung, head of the
Korea Women Workers’ Association, told reporters.

“In such an unfair world as this, how hard should women try to climb the
ladder — if we can get our hands on the ladder at all?”

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