Among women employees at domestically listed corporations, only 0.4% are appointed as executives. That is one-fourth the level of men.
KCGI Asset Management, marking International Women's Day, said on the 6th that it analyzed gender equality indicators for 360 major domestically listed corporations with ESG rating agency Sustinvest and found these results.
In Nov. 2018, KCGI Asset Management launched KCGI The Woman Securities Investment Company, which makes long-term investments by selecting corporations with relatively strong gender diversity and gender equity and with high economic decision-making power for women, among those with solid fundamentals, for the first time in Korea. As of the end of Feb., its net worth stood at 33.4 billion won.
The share of women employees at the corporations surveyed rose 3.6 percentage points, from 25.0% in 2020 to 28.6% in 2024. In particular, among mid-sized corporations with total assets under 2 trillion won, women accounted for 30.5% of employees, showing a steady rise of women in the hiring market.
However, the share of women in senior posts such as executives and on boards remained low. In 2024, the surveyed corporations had an average of 698 women employees, of whom 2.9 were appointed as executives, or just 0.42%.
Only 4 out of every 1,000 women employees are appointed as executives. Compared with the 1.6% executive ratio among men employees, that is one-fourth as high.
Among large corporations with total assets of 2 trillion won or more, 4.8 out of 1,372 women employees were executives, for an executive ratio of 0.35%. A total of 292 corporations (81.1%) had no women inside directors.
A total of 171 corporations (47.5%) appointed women as outside directors.
KCGI Asset Management noted, "This shows corporations are focusing on a 'quota filling' response by bringing in outside experts rather than fostering leaders through internal promotion, to respond to external pressure such as the 2020 amendment to the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act that mandated gender diversity on boards."
Differences in average years of service between women and men varied somewhat by industry, but overall there was little change in 2024 compared with 2021.
The gender pay gap generally narrowed but remained large.
By industry, among energy and utilities with assets of 2 trillion won or more, the ratio of men's pay to women's pay fell from 1.51 in 2021 to 1.44 in 2024. In consumer goods and services, the pay ratio also decreased over the same period from 1.46 to 1.29, and in finance it fell from 1.62 to 1.39.