여성 일자리 창출의 장애요인과 법제도적 정책과제

Abstract

Despite a number of legislations including the Equal Employment Act in 1987, aiming at boosting women’s employment and reducing gender discrimination, the women’s economic activity rates remain as low as 49.2% as of 2009, suggesting that more than half of women are still economically inactive. In this paper, I explore the major causes of women’s low job creation by looking into the labor market structures, and also propose legal and institutional policy measures for creating more jobs for women. Firstly, women workers tend to leave their job mainly when they give birth to and/or raise children. And when they manage to return to labor market, they are more likely to find jobs with little stability and little security such as irregular or self-employed jobs primarily due to the career interruption. Secondly, even though many irregular or self-employed jobs are full-time based, they cannot be regarded as decent jobs because of the instability and low payment. Therefore, those jobs are hardly attractive especially for married women with relatively high education. Key Words : Career Interruption, Job Creation for Women, Part-time JobLastly, although part-time jojs are suggested as jobs with work-family balance, most jobs with short working hours in reality are low paid and irregular, which rarely meets the need of the women who want both job security and short working hours. In order to create jobs for women, the quality as well as quantity of social childcare services should be increased so that women can be relieved of childcare burden and women’s status in labor market need to be improved by enforcing gender-related laws and regulations, and also by revising labor laws including the current Irregular Workers Act.