 
Feminism in South Korea is the origin and history of feminism or women's rights in South Korea. 
As of 2023, South Korea ranked 105th out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index which evaluates gender-based gaps in education, welfare, employment, and political power.
Women's suffrage in South Korea was included in Article 11 of the national constitution in 1948, which states that "all citizens shall be equal before the law, and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic, social or cultural life on account of sex, religion or social status." The feminist or women's rights movement in South Korea is quite recent compared to first wave and second-wave feminism in the Western world. While drastic changes in the workplace and economy have been implemented as a result of the industrialization of the economy and globalization, there has been less change in cultural values in South Korean society.
History.
Confucianism.
Due to its history of a monarchical government, strict hierarchical social divisions, and patriarchal family structure, Korean society has maintained social structures that justify unfair social treatment and distribution of unequal roles to men and women. At the center of this phenomenon, Confucianist ideologies still weigh heavily on people's minds. The Confucian tenet of filial piety requires women to obey men. One tenet about women's obedience translated as: "to the father when young; to the husband when married; and to the son in old age." This emphasizes the wife's obedience to the main male figure in her life. Combined with Confucianism's emphasis on relationships among people rather than individual freedom, gender discrimination was justified with this ideology, in which not only men but also women themselves recognize women's subordinate nature, consciously or not.
Japanese colonial period.
The colonization of Korea by Japan led to the adoption of Japanese family laws. After the establishment of United States military rule in South Korea, most of the Japanese colonial legal system was left intact, and all legal documents remained effective unless especially repealed by a special ordinance. Family law cemented patriarchy in a legal sense by prioritizing male heirs in inheritance law, among other sexist policies. The process of decolonization caused a rift between those who were eager to dismantle all colonial structures of rule and those who associated these family structures with traditional Korean culture and did not want to cause disruptions in these structures.
Korean women's movement.
The Korean women's movement started in the 1890s with the foundation of Chanyang-hoe, followed by many other groups, primarily focused on women's education and the abolition of gender segregation and other discriminatory practices.
When Korea became a Japanese colony in 1910, women's associations were banned by the Japanese and many women instead engaged in underground resistance groups such as the Yosong Aeguk Tongji-hoe (Patriotic Women's Society) and the Taehan Aeguk Buin-hoe (Korean Patriotic Women's Society). As a result, the role of women in society began to change.
Kim Ransa was an early Korean teacher known for her advocacy of women's empowerment through education. In response to a piece written by Yun Chi-ho in the journal "The Korea Mission Field" in July 1911 detailing the need for Korean women to learn how to do household chores, Kim published a rebuttal piece asserting that "the purpose of education for women is not to cook or sew better," and that "women students should not be blamed, with a lack of evidence, for not knowing how to do laundry or ironing.
After the end of the War and the partition of Korea in 1945, the Korean women's movement was split. In North Korea, all women's movements were channeled into the Korean Democratic Women's Union. In South Korea, the women's movement was united under the Korean National Council of Women in 1959, which in 1973 organized the women's group in the Pan-Women's Society for the Revision of the Family Law to revise the discriminatory Family Law of 1957, a cause that remained a focus for the rest of the 20th-century and did not result in any major reform until 1991.
Women after South Korean independence.
After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the Korean peninsula was divided and South Korea was placed under American administration. In 1948, South Korea was established as an independent nation.
Initially after gaining independence, the nation suffered significant political and economic chaos, but in the 1960s the rapid economic growth of Korea caused traditional views of gender to be challenged. With vast economic growth through rapid industrialization and modernization, the roles of men and women had to be redefined. With the advent of democracy and capitalism, women started to do work in public spaces, participated in political activity (once their suffrage was legitimized in the 1948 Constitution), and gained more opportunities to pursue higher education including college and university degrees.
Even though access to education had improved, gender discrepancies manifested in more subtle ways. Gender discrimination was prevalent without any conscious questioning about its moral validity. Although women were no longer prohibited from doing economic activities, poor working conditions, low wages compared to those of male workers, and sexual harassment in the workplace discouraged women workers.
In a 2023 survey, 11% of women stated they had received unwanted sexual advances in the workplace, whereas just 3.4% of men said the same. Almost half of women reported that they had heard sexist comments from coworkers. The number of women who claimed that their colleagues had made inappropriate comments about their physical appearance was triple that of men.
Economic and employment inequality.
Types of employment.
The opening up of higher education did not coincide with material changes in the roles and work done by women. Besides certain careers commonly pursued by women such as nursing or hairdressing, job opportunities were not equally given to women; especially to women in college or as university graduates. Women were consistently excluded from companies' and work sites' employment scope. According to a 2021 survey of over 21 million Korean workers, almost 2 in 3 working women were office clerks, caregivers, cashiers, cleaners, cooks, social workers, production workers, school teachers, or nurses.
Gender-based disparities in workers' rights and pay persist "despite an above-average level of female tertiary education", according to an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE). There have been more female students in higher education than men since 2009. In 2022, this figure was 76.6% for women compared with 70.3% for men. While South Korea had the highest rate of tertiary education among women of all OECD nations in 2018, they simultaneously ranked in the bottom 20% for female employment.
Following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, women were disproportionately given temporary, unstable jobs known as Korean: ; RR:  which have fewer legal protections and are notoriously low-paid. As of 2022, half of working women hold "bijeongkyujik" jobs, whereas only 1 in 3 male workers hold such jobs, with an hourly wage of less than 70% of their male counterparts.
Out of 15,000 high-level executives at South Korea's 500 largest firms, just 2.7% are female. Only 0.5% of the CEOs of the top 1,000 companies are women who do not have familial ties to the company.
Wage gap.
In 2023, the South Korean government's Ministry of Gender Equality and Family revealed that 60.0% of women aged 15–64 were employed, compared to 76.9% of men. The average wage per person across 370 companies was ₩ for women and ₩ for men, representing a gap of 26.3%.
Of all the OECD nations, South Korea has the widest gender pay gap of 36.7% (2018). In the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, South Korea has the biggest gender pay gap. Women earn 31% less than men.
In a 2023 report by the World Bank on women in business, South Korea gained a perfect score for categories such as mobility, marriage, assets, and pensions, but scored just 25 out of 100 for the "pay" category. Only nine countries ranked lower than South Korea for women's pay, including Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Syria.
In the banking industry, there is a disparity between men's and women's earnings, but the gap is gradually closing. At KEB Hana Bank, a male employee earned on average 1.53 times more than his female colleagues in 2019. By 2022, the difference had decreased by 10%. Shinhan Bank's gender gap shrank 20% in the same period.
Working mothers &amp; low birth rates.
Korea's low birth rate has been declared a national emergency. To maintain South Korea's population of 51 million people, the birth rate (i.e. the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in their lifetime) should be 2.1. In the third quarter of 2023, this number was just 0.7. The number of babies born in South Korea decreased by 11.5% between 2022 and 2023, with marriages falling by 8.2%. Some analysts have suggested that the lack of work-life balance, as well as the rising cost of children's education, has caused many couples to delay having kids. 2 out of 3 married women who stated they did not want to have kids did so "due to fear of their careers being disrupted (by childbirth)".
The Korea Development Institute (KDI) released a report in 2023 suggesting that the declining birth rate was connected to an increase in women's participation in the economy. It stated that the economic engagement of women aged 30–34 increased by 13% between 2017 and 2022. In the same period, the number of women aged 30–34 with children fell by 31%, with the ratio of women with more than one child decreasing from 22.9% to 13.6%.
Child-rearing in South Korea makes it extremely difficult for women to participate in the workforce, as they are still expected to be the child's primary caregiver. Research by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) highlighted that women are expected to choose either a career or have a family, and how it is a struggle to sustain both. Figures show that in 2021, 3.24 million women were unemployed, with reasons for abstaining from work ranging from childcare (43.2%), marriage (27.4%), and pregnancy/childbirth (22.1%). The proportion of employed women with children under the age of 18 was reportedly 60% in 2023. The PIIE attributes this issue to long work hours—the highest of any OECD nation—coupled with a lack of flexibility for working parents.
Research by the Korean Peninsula Population Institute for Future (KPPIF) suggests that workplace culture can also impact someone's decision to have children. They reported that, of people who were satisfied with their workplace, 60% stated that they were planning to have children, compared to just 45% of those who were unsatisfied with their workplace.
Some companies have chosen to enforce changes to help improve the country's low birth rates. Hyundai Motor established a specialized task force to support workers struggling to conceive. The number of paid days an employee can take to undergo fertility treatments was increased from 3 to 5 days, and the company agreed to cover the costs of up to ₩ per treatment.
In 2023, the Seoul Metropolitan Government announced it would invest ₩ into measures to support working families. In 2022, they introduced subsidies for parents undertaking fertility treatments. From 2024, Seoul Metropolitan Government workers with children aged 0 to 9 will be able to adjust their working hours to accommodate their childcare commitments. A representative from the Seoul Metropolitan Government stated that they hoped this change would inspire the private sector to follow suit.
Equal Employment Opportunity and Work-Family Balance Assistance Act.
There have been some improvements to workers' rights to support working mothers. The act, first introduced in 2007, aimed to promote equality between men and women "by protecting motherhood, and by promoting the employment of women, but also to improving the quality of all the people's lives by assisting work-family balance of employees".
While the act made the discrimination of an employee based on gender, marriage, family, pregnancy, or childbirth illegal, it did not clearly define what exactly is considered "discrimination".
In 2023, the Supreme Court of South Korea pronounced that denying employment to a working parent who is unable to work public holidays or early hours is unlawful. The Supreme Court ruled that an employer has a "duty of care" to employees raising children 8 years or younger by adjusting their working hours to accommodate childcare commitments, citing Article 19-5 of the Equal Employment Opportunity and Work-Family Balance Assistance Act.
In addition, the same act dictates that businesses with more than 500 workers (or more than 300 female workers) must either