South Korean labor market discrimination against women - a comment

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  July, 1996  by Ik-Whan G. Kwon

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Monk-Turner and Turner raised in this Journal (53, 4, Oct. 1994:433-42) an issue on low labor participation rates by married and highly educated women in South Korea. They claimed that sex discrimination against them in South Korea have cost billions of dollars in gross domestic product. They concluded (440) that ". . . the combined effect on earnings for South Korean women attaining the same relative level of compensation and participation rates as United States women is 18,314 billion won ($27.3 billion)."

Their analysis is highly simplistic ignoring the complex social networks enjoyed by the society (men and women alike) for generations. Comparative analysis of women's labor participation between two different societies where dominant values and customs are deeply dissimilar is misleading. It is true that the women's labor participation rate in South Korea is lower. However, there is a good reason - a social opportunity cost - that many married and highly educated women prefer staying away from the labor market.

People in South Korea (men and women alike) value intangible contributions that married women are making to the family structure and to society. They believe, it does not matter whether such belief is based on Confucian tradition, as the authors seem to imply, or Christian teaching. Raising children properly by a traditional parent especially by mothers is the most valuable contribution that only a mother can make toward the family.

There is an abundance of literature pointing out that most of teens' social problems are rooted to the dysfunctional family structure. Simple statistics will illustrate the ills of social problems between South Korea and the United States. The U.S. divorce rate is more than four times higher.

Often teens' problems are related to crime rates. According to Table 2, the overall crime rate by teens in 1988 was 590 per 100,000 teens in South Korea whereas the corresponding information for this country was almost 3,000 per 100,000 teens. The murder rate by teens in Korea was 0.8 per 100,000 teens whereas the murder rate by teens in this country was 6.5 per 100,000 in 1988.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to place a monetary value on crimes committed by teens who are usually brought up by dysfunctional families. However, it is not too difficult to envision the intangible contribution to society that married women and highly educated women in South Korea are creating. The authors' estimating model would be more realistic and beneficial had it included such social opportunity cost.

Reply - Elizabeth Monk-Turner and Charles G. Turner

The comment that we should not impose United States standards on other countries has some merit and we plan in future studies of this kind to use the country that has been most successful at providing economic access to women rather than the United States. Of course, an argument could be made to use the U.S. since it is the largest economy, but it would be better to use a country that has achieved the greatest sexual equality.

The comment about possible benefits of having women in the home rather than the workplace misses the point. We are trying to measure the economic cost of sexual barriers to the economic participation of women in South Korea. If men or women choose to spend time at home with children instead of working, of course, that is their right and will have its own compensations. However, if there exists a pattern of discrimination which virtually forces women into second class economic conditions, that will have very real economic costs which should be considered by the society which is so structuring itself. We are working on a cross sectional study which shows that South Korean men earn about 30 percent more than women after controlling for experience and education.

Ik-Whan G. Kwon, PhD., is Professor of Decision Sciences in the School of Business and Administration at Saint Louis University, St Louis, MO 63108.

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