By Deauwand Myers
We know developing and impoverished countries are confronted with socioeconomic and sociopolitical gender inequities. However, some advanced democracies are way behind in gender equity. In particular: America, Japan and, alas, Korea.
Case in point: right before the Chuseok holiday, a professor and coworker friend of mine and I were chatting. She had brought me some slices of pumpkin pie. Heavenly. By all accounts, she's happy and healthy and her family is doing well.
Laughingly, she bemoaned the coming holiday. She's expected to do the majority of cooking and cleaning for her immediate and extended family for the entirety of the Chuseok holiday, lengthened this year to six business days.
Her Korean mother-in-law will help. Presumably, her husband will pitch in. What fascinated me more than all of this is an admission she made toward the end of our conversation: she will continue to work for the foreseeable future, and not for a salary, per se.
If she became a homemaker, she ruminated, (talking to herself as much as she was talking to me), she'd be expected to do all the housework and childcare without reprieve. An unkempt laundry room, or an unmade bed, would be seen as a lapse in her responsibilities. My impression was she is already hearing this, at least implicitly, even though she works full-time.
Korea has one of the most unbalanced percentages of working mothers doing nearly all of the housework and childcare of any advanced nation.
Women in Korea earn less than 65 cents to every dollar that their male counterparts earn. In Japan, it's nearly the same. In America, for white women, it's 70 cents or so. For women of color: less than 70 cents. In some cases, the wage disparity is less than 60 cents for comparable work and qualifications in the same position of employment.
Globally, women still do a majority of the unpaid labor of childcare, housework, and care for sick and/or elderly family members, not to mention the emotional and psychological expenditure said labor requires.
Women are still disproportionately employed in the most vulnerable, low-wage, high-stress jobs with little or no labor protection or basic social welfare benefits. In Asia, minus agricultural work, nearly 80 percent of working women work in informal employment.
If this weren't bad enough, the long-term socioeconomic effects of women working low-wage jobs leads to a poorly financed retirement, or no retirement at all. Pension and retirement payments are based off a lifetime of taxing one's income. The less income one makes, the less pension one receives upon retirement. No wonder then that the vast majority of the impoverished in Korea, Japan, and America are women and children.
In Korea, this has led to an increasing number of elderly women selling their bodies in the sex trade industry for a few dollars to whoever would have them. Amongst other slang terms, these elderly women are called "Bacchus ladies," because they use the cover of selling the energy drinks to solicit their prostitution services.
In any civilized society, this would be a scandal. Yet, Korea supposedly cherishes the elderly as wise and honored. To tolerate women in their golden years turning to sidewalk prostitution for the price of a McDonald's value meal in wages is breathtaking and heartbreaking.
Though overall crime is quite low in Korea and Japan, the percentage of violent crime against women is some of the highest of any developed nation in both countries: domestic abuse, sexual assault, murder, and forced labor, including sex work via human trafficking, are the primary offenses.
As much as America likes to claim how fairly women are treated in the overall society, our statistics are even worse in some regards. The "pro-life," conservative faction in American political life, love to talk about the beauty of birth and sanctity of life, yet have cut the budget for even rudimentary research on decreasing infant mortality and women's deaths during childbirth.
More women die in childbirth in America than in any other developed country, and physicians say this will only increase over time. In other countries, maternal death rates have fallen sharply over the past generation. (In Korea, childbirth deaths fell from 20.7 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 12 today. In most of Western Europe, the rate has been halved or better.)
It's 2017. Yet, in Korea, like most of the planet, men still control most levers of power. The benefits of women having a more equitable distribution of opportunities and resources are estimated to be in the tens of trillions of dollars worldwide. When women have more socioeconomic and sociopolitical power, the society as a whole is positively affected, particularly children. Until we, I mean the human species, decide that women are equal to men in human worth and dignity, I will stand by my initial assertion: Men still suck.
Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.
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Case in point: right before the Chuseok holiday, a professor and coworker friend of mine and I were chatting. She had brought me some slices of pumpkin pie. Heavenly. By all accounts, she's happy and healthy and her family is doing well.
Laughingly, she bemoaned the coming holiday. She's expected to do the majority of cooking and cleaning for her immediate and extended family for the entirety of the Chuseok holiday, lengthened this year to six business days.
Her Korean mother-in-law will help. Presumably, her husband will pitch in. What fascinated me more than all of this is an admission she made toward the end of our conversation: she will continue to work for the foreseeable future, and not for a salary, per se.
If she became a homemaker, she ruminated, (talking to herself as much as she was talking to me), she'd be expected to do all the housework and childcare without reprieve. An unkempt laundry room, or an unmade bed, would be seen as a lapse in her responsibilities. My impression was she is already hearing this, at least implicitly, even though she works full-time.
Korea has one of the most unbalanced percentages of working mothers doing nearly all of the housework and childcare of any advanced nation.
Women in Korea earn less than 65 cents to every dollar that their male counterparts earn. In Japan, it's nearly the same. In America, for white women, it's 70 cents or so. For women of color: less than 70 cents. In some cases, the wage disparity is less than 60 cents for comparable work and qualifications in the same position of employment.
Globally, women still do a majority of the unpaid labor of childcare, housework, and care for sick and/or elderly family members, not to mention the emotional and psychological expenditure said labor requires.
Women are still disproportionately employed in the most vulnerable, low-wage, high-stress jobs with little or no labor protection or basic social welfare benefits. In Asia, minus agricultural work, nearly 80 percent of working women work in informal employment.
If this weren't bad enough, the long-term socioeconomic effects of women working low-wage jobs leads to a poorly financed retirement, or no retirement at all. Pension and retirement payments are based off a lifetime of taxing one's income. The less income one makes, the less pension one receives upon retirement. No wonder then that the vast majority of the impoverished in Korea, Japan, and America are women and children.
In Korea, this has led to an increasing number of elderly women selling their bodies in the sex trade industry for a few dollars to whoever would have them. Amongst other slang terms, these elderly women are called "Bacchus ladies," because they use the cover of selling the energy drinks to solicit their prostitution services.
In any civilized society, this would be a scandal. Yet, Korea supposedly cherishes the elderly as wise and honored. To tolerate women in their golden years turning to sidewalk prostitution for the price of a McDonald's value meal in wages is breathtaking and heartbreaking.
Though overall crime is quite low in Korea and Japan, the percentage of violent crime against women is some of the highest of any developed nation in both countries: domestic abuse, sexual assault, murder, and forced labor, including sex work via human trafficking, are the primary offenses.
As much as America likes to claim how fairly women are treated in the overall society, our statistics are even worse in some regards. The "pro-life," conservative faction in American political life, love to talk about the beauty of birth and sanctity of life, yet have cut the budget for even rudimentary research on decreasing infant mortality and women's deaths during childbirth.
More women die in childbirth in America than in any other developed country, and physicians say this will only increase over time. In other countries, maternal death rates have fallen sharply over the past generation. (In Korea, childbirth deaths fell from 20.7 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 12 today. In most of Western Europe, the rate has been halved or better.)
It's 2017. Yet, in Korea, like most of the planet, men still control most levers of power. The benefits of women having a more equitable distribution of opportunities and resources are estimated to be in the tens of trillions of dollars worldwide. When women have more socioeconomic and sociopolitical power, the society as a whole is positively affected, particularly children. Until we, I mean the human species, decide that women are equal to men in human worth and dignity, I will stand by my initial assertion: Men still suck.
Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.
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