Women take up only 7.2 percent of the top jobs at over 300 state-run organizations and corporations in South Korea, governmental data showed Monday.

Out of the 332 heads of state agencies, only 24 are women, with four of them working in organizations under the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, according to data from Public Information in One, a government-run portal on public entities.


Female chiefs are even more scarce in the judicial sector. Only two out of 14 Supreme Court justices and one out of nine Constitutional Court justices are women.

For public servants of grade five or higher, the figure stood at 16.6 percent in 2015, up 10 percentage points from 10 years ago, according to separate data released by the Ministry of Personnel Management.

Fifty-one of 300 legislators, or 17 percent, in the National Assembly are women. Inter-Parliamentary Union’s 2016 data shows that the proportion remains far lower than that of Sweden, where 43.6 percent of legislator positions are filled by women, followed by 42.4 percent in Mexico, 36.5 percent in Germany, 26.2 percent in France and 19.2 percent in the United States.

Japan’s proportion of women in the legislative sector stood at 9.5 percent in 2016.

To tackle gender inequality issues, President Moon Jae-in, who took office Wednesday, has pledged to increase the proportion of female ministers in his new administration to up to 50 percent during his term.

For a start, Moon named Cho Hyun-ock, a visiting professor at Ehwa Womans University in Seoul, on Thursday as his top secretary for personnel affairs. She is the first woman to hold that position, which involves managing human resources at the presidential office.

By Bak Se-hwan (sh@heraldcorp.com)