Toward Equity for Women in Korea's Development Plans

Abstract

The rapidity of Korea's economic development over the past two decades has created extreme stress within its society and engendered great confusion over appropriate or acceptable sex roles. The leap into economic modernity has been made by large-scale adoption of Western or Japanese economic and industrial patterns. Men tend to imitate the West in their public lifek but to continue to expect traditional behavior in their private lives which are characterized by sex-segregation and hierarchical relationships. Where economic necessity has brought women into the modern labor force, generally at the lower end of the employment scale, they have been tolerated by categorizing and treating them as girls, and hence without even female adult status. Generally, these workers are forced, by social pressure if not by actual contract, to resign upon marriage.