Too few college-educated women participate in South Korea’s workforce, a factor that is likely to affect the country’s prospects for long-term economic growth. Educated women must therefore play a larger role if South Korea is to become one of the world’s most economically advanced nations.
That goal may be a stretch. South Korea already belongs to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). But a McKinsey study has found that if the country is to become one of the OECD’s top ten members (ranked by gross domestic product per head) as of 2010, its GDP per capita (purchasing-power-parity basis) would have to grow by 6.1 percent annually.1 Such high growth would generate 3 million new jobs, at least 1.2 million of them for professionals. But as things stand today, South Korea wouldn’t be able to fill those jobs only with men, since more than 90 percent of its college-educated men already participate in the labor force.
Although nearly half of today’s college graduates in South Korea are women, only 54 percent of its female college graduates participate in the labor force—the lowest such rate of any member of the OECD. By contrast, the corresponding rate for South...