No. of female earners surpasses 10 million

The number of female workers receiving wages and salaries in South Korea has surpassed the 10 million mark this year, government data showed Monday.

According to data released by Statistics Korea, the female wage and salaried workforce in 2024 reached 10.15 million, an approximately 17.7-fold increase since the government began collecting such data in 1963.

Specifically, 6.962 million of these female workers were regular employees, 2.907 million were temporary workers, and 283,000 were categorized as day laborers. Meanwhile, the number of male wage workers stood at 11.875 million, marking a 6.6-fold increase since 1963.

The rise in female employment has been accompanied by an increasing number of self-employed women, totaling 1.72 million in 2024, which constitutes 30.5 percent of all self-employed individuals.

Despite these advancements, South Korea's gender wage disparity remains significant. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the wage gap between men and women in Korea was 31.2 percent in 2022, the largest among the 36 countries with available data. This means that, on average, female workers earned 68.8 percent of what their male counterparts did. This disparity is higher than that of any other OECD country and is more than double the OECD average of 12.1 percent.