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"When I started my career as a journalist at a newspaper company in the late 1980s, the cultural environment of media industry was very male dominant. Few female journalists including me had to work harder to be recognized than male coworkers. When the Asian economic crisis hit the Korean economy severely in 1998, I quit my ten-year-long job to go to graduate school to understand better what’s going on the world as well as Korean economy. With my master’s degree, I joined the Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Energy as the first Foreign Press Spokesperson. As the Korean economy quickly recovered from the crisis, I felt it was time to take a second challenge. I quit the job again to study further. After receiving a PhD degree in Management, I joined the faculty of the College of Business, Kookmin University in Seoul. Among many research agendas I have had, women leadership has caught my attention more and more. I began to realize then that the gender gap had remained unsolved here for a long time.

Gender gap indices in Korea such as gender wage gap and female labor market participation rate have been far behind those of OECD member countries. In the 2017 Global Gender Gap Report, Korea was ranked 118/144, with a score of gender parity of 0.65 (99/146 in 2022, score of 0,69). Korea was also ranked as the lowest among OECD member countries in terms of the percentage of female board members, 2.5% as of 2017. We have few elite women and sport stars who are shining in our sky but women are still under-represented in decision-making level and we have to promote them in all areas of the society. My major research question is as follows. Why do we have so few female leadership in organizations? There are many factors to explain the gap, I want to point out that ‘lack of role models’ might result in low career aspiration of female middle managers. That’s why I support the ‘introduction of quota on female board members’ like European countries. As the quota system is proving to be very effective in balancing gender inequality, I support the introduction of the system in our country."

Eun Hyhong Lee,
Professor at Kookmin University, President of Korean Women Economists Association

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