Gender Inequality In South Korea Essay

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South Korea has a long and interesting history of oppression and social stratification that has always been the center of controversy. The economic and political system have historically been ruled and invaded by surrounding countries. South Korea has since gained their independence back. The Republic of Korea is a strong, and willful country that continues to have prominence in global relations, and continues to strive for success; however, in spite of progress in many areas, there still is quite a lot of gender inequality. This paper will identify the origin of gender inequality, how gender inequality has evolved over the years, and the different sub-groups and structures that gender inequality continues to exist in all areas of South Korea. A great deal of the gender inequality stems from Korea’s being historically a patriarchal society and the Confucianism beginnings. South Korea has made so much progress and effort in many areas, but the issue of gender inequality continues to exist.
South Korea was originally an independent country that was ruled by their respective dynasties and had a society of political independence and their own cultural identity. Korea was originally ruled by different kingdoms, and a majority of their high-class culture came from some Chinese ideas, including using Chinese characters in their written language, and the use of Neo-Confucianism as the philosophy of the ruling elite. It was not until the early twentieth century that they lost a lot of their identity due to Japan’s colonization. After the occupation of Korea, and the Korean War, South Korea in the past fifty-plus years has re-vamped their identity and made known that they are a prominent country in trade and global relations. (Armstrong...

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...to keep up with appearances and because everyone is so critical of one another. The research in this article also found that in a survey conducted by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, released in December of 2012, of more than 900 female government and public school workers, 12 percent said they had been verbally or physically sexually harassed over the year. Of those 93% said that they put up with it because of the issue of not hurting their public image, because most of the time the women are blamed for their sexual harassment. The author of this article also interviewed Kim Yong-jick, a professor at Seoul’s Sungshin Women’s University, who specializes in the study of modern South Korean history, stated that Korean women are less aware of their rights compared to the women in the U.S., and this is why men can get away with sexual harassment (Kim, 2013).

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