President Park Geun-hye announced several pledges concerning women during the last presidential election and cried out the slogan, "a world where women are proudly recognized for their abilities."

During election season, she claimed she would train 100,000 talented women fit for the future by 2017, and in her statement on the three-year plan for economic innovation in 2014, she stressed, "We will create 1.5 million jobs for women." But during the three years that a female president was in office, experts argue that the gap between men and women was biggest in labor, a sector that the government had so stressed, and female representation.

The relative wages of women are lower and the quality of jobs has also fallen. The government released measures to increase female employment, such as the expansion of time-flexible jobs and retraining of women with career breaks, but the percentage of women with career breaks due to marriage or child care among women aged 15-54 has slightly increased to 20.7% in 2015 compared to 20.3% in 2012. Women receive a lower salary compared to men. They now receive only 63.1% of the men's wages compared to 64.4% in 2012.

Park-Cha Ok-kyung, secretary-general of the Korea Women's Associations United pointed out, "This is because the government only forced women to work and to keep a family and presented unstable jobs as an alternative that can coexist with housework, while ignoring to address the fundamental gender inequality." The Korea Women's Associations United selected the government's labor policy including the amendment to the labor bills and its two major guidelines, as the "Obstacle of the Year for Gender Equality," arguing that it would allow for unstable employment and easy layoff of female workers.

Ironically, women's political rights were reduced under a female president. According to a report on gender disparity released each year by the World Economic Forum (WEF), South Korea falls behind most in politics among four sectors--education, economy, health, and politics. According to the 2015 report, the percentage of women in our National Assembly and the percentage of women in the cabinet ranked in the bottom, 94th and 130th respectively.

Almost 50% of our civil servants are women, but only 4.5% of grade 1-3 senior officials were women in 2014. Public agencies have adopted a "target for appointing female officials" since 2014, but only 17 agencies (38%) among 45 agencies subject to the government's performance evaluation reached the target of appointing 10.9% of female managers, grades 4 or higher in 2014.

The situation was the same in the private sector. In 2014, female executives only accounted for 0.4% of the entire staff in South Korea. This was only a sixth of the men (2.4%), ranking last among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

According to the "National Glass Ceiling Index" by the British weekly magazine, The Economist, the percentage of women in senior positions in South Korea was only 11% among the total senior positions, and among the directors women only accounted for 2.1%.