At 27, a woman in South Korea earns 8% less than male peers. By her late 50s, she earns 50% less. This is according to government wage data published in a recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.
South Korea is a global technology and industrial powerhouse, but its gender pay gap has remained the highest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) since comparable records began in 1992.
"The gender division of labor inside the home leads directly to a gender division of labor in the labor market," Min Hee Kim, a Korean activist for women labor struggles, told DW.
The problem, she argues, is not simply that women are paid less than men. As women age, the kinds of work available to them narrows and the consequences of lower pay, career breaks and precarious jobs accumulate.
For the report, "Too Old and a Woman," HRW interviewed 41 South Korean women aged 28 to 87 about their working lives.
Structural barriers to women's careers
Discrimination has changed form rather than disappeared, Kim said. Until the 1980s, it was legal for employers to fire women simply for getting married, a practice known as "marriage-based dismissal," where employers assumed a married woman would soon leave to raise children anyway.
Today, "it is difficult to openly say, 'We won't hire you because you're a woman,'" Kim added. But caregiving responsibilities still fall on women, pushing them into lower-paid jobs when they try to return to work.
According to the HRW report, women's university attainment has passed men's since the 1980s. Higher education would suggest equal opportunity after graduation, but the job market says otherwise.
One year after graduating, women already earn 22% less than men, according to a 2024 study.
Many women told HRW that after leaving work for marriage or children, chances of returning to the workforce were limited to a handful of jobs such as call centers, cleaning or caregiving.
Women who opt to focus on their career told HRW they hit a glass ceiling at work. Women held 18% of manager jobs in 2024, and only five of 38 senior civil servants were women.
Wages peak and drop off
Women's wages peak in their late 30s and then steadily decline, according to Labor Ministry survey data cited by HRW.
South Korea's Gender Ministry told HRW that career interruptions, along with occupational segregation and discrimination within organizations, drive the gap.
J. Mi-sook, 53, told HRW that her three years of experience weren't recognized by her next employer, so she started at entry level on a lower salary.
The longer women spend outside the workforce, the less experience they accumulate on their resumes, which results in less pay and less work stability.
Kim pointed to structural discrimination, a concept from the report that HRW describes as discrimination so embedded in social practices and institutions that even the people harmed by it may not recognize it as a problem.
"When you are alone, it is easy to think, 'It's because I'm not capable enough,' or 'It's because I'm getting older,'" she said. It's only when women who've had similar experiences meet and talk, she added, that they realize, "this wasn't just my problem."
It gets harder as you get older
Park Jae-soon, 61, was forced to retire at 60 from a utility company and now works part-time as a care worker. Her annual income fell from 55 million won ($40,500/€35,600) to 15.6 million won, a 72% drop.
HRW argues the mandatory retirement age and the "peak wage" system, which lets employers cut older workers' pay in the years before retirement, should both be abolished.
According to data cited in the report, women received 53% of men's National Old Age Pension on average in October 2025, a 47% gap.
"I think what is important here is that this is not simply a problem of middle-aged women having difficulty finding jobs," Kim said.
"The work that women have traditionally done inside the home, like cleaning, cooking, caregiving and managing other people's emotions, is classified as 'work suitable for women' when it enters the labor market, and then low wages are assigned to it," she added.
From first paycheck to pension
HRW argues the disadvantage builds stage by stage, from a woman's first paycheck up until her pension.
"Career interruption among women in their 30s is already a pension issue," Kim said. "Part-time work among women in their 40s is a pension issue, and low wages among women in their 50s are already a pension issue," she added.
South Korea's government has said it will pursue a phased increase in the statutory retirement age from 60 to 65.
"This cannot be solved with just one policy. Equal pay for equal work needs to be actually implemented, wage structures need to be transparent, and care needs to be treated as a public responsibility rather than something that is pushed onto individual families and women," Kim said.
The rights activist said the report is an important starting point, but believes its picture is incomplete.
Most interviewees were recruited through civic organizations and largely in Seoul, she noted, while disabled women, migrant workers and others may experience a different combination of age and gender discrimination.
"The important question is not simply, 'How much discrimination do women face?'" she said. "It is which women, in what positions, become increasingly distanced from which resources and rights as they grow older."
