Half of Public Servants Now Women

About half of public servants in patriarchal Korea are now women.

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According to figures published on Wednesday by the Ministry of Personnel Management, women accounted for 49.4 percent of civil servants last year or 315,290 of 637,658.

But they rarely hold senior positions, and the vast majority or 79.6 percent work for the Education Ministry, which means most are teachers in state schools.

The ministry has by far the largest number of civil servants on its payroll with 56.7 percent of the total, and 69.5 percent of them are women.

That means the bureaucracy remains substantially in male hands. Excluding the Education Ministry, the percentage of women in public service drops to a poor 23.3 percent.

The proportion is creeping up at a snail's pace of 0.4 to one percentage point a year.

Meanwhile, 1,269 male public servants took parental leave last year, accounting for 15.9 percent of the 7,993 who did. That was nearly double the 623 men in 2011.