Korean women earned 67% of what men earned in 2017

여성 월급 229만원…남성의 67% 수준 More and more women are active contributors of the nation's workforce.Over fifty percent of them are employed with a growing number of mothers returning to work.However, according to our Kim Hye-sung, there still lies a big wage gap between men and women. Data from Statistics Korea show women's average monthly wages came to about 2-thousand-50 U.S. dollars last year, up four-point-three percent from the year before.Still, that's only two-thirds of what was earned by Korean men, who made on average about 3-thousand-50 U.S. dollars a month. In 2013, Korean women earned 68 cents on the dollar compared to men. That fell to around 66 cents in 2015, and then went up slightly in 2016 and 2017. Statsitics Korea attributed the gender pay gap to women working irregular jobs... and to interruptions to their careers caused by marriage, childbirth and childrearing. In August 2017, 3-point-six million women, or 4 out of ten women in the labor force, were employed on a temporary basis.This is much higher than the rate for men, of whom 26 percent are irregular workers. At the same time, the average continuous working years for women was four-point-seven years, two-point five years shorter than that for men. Yet data show the areas women work in have become more diverse. For the first time last year, women accounted for more than half of the public servants employed by Korea's interior ministry. The ratio of women in law and medicine also went up compared to the previous year, coming to 26 percent, 25-point-four percent, respectively. Kim Hyesung, Arirang News.