The World Where Women are Happy: International Comparison of Gender Equality in OECD Arena

Abstract

This paper firstly examines the main causes of gender discrimination and overviews the status quo of gender equality in OECD arena and gender equality indices developed by major international fora. It also designs a new index with a reference to the capability approach, and those indices, and identifies the key factors behind gender discrimination within the OECD countries by performing Principal Component Analysis, and derives weights for each of 8 indicators and the rankings of member countries. In the analysis, we confirmed that Korea ranked the 31st, belonging to the lowest ranked group among 34 OECD member countries, seriously imposed to the poor environment for gender equality. Eastern European countries such as Poland and Western Europe countries such as Sweden occupy top, which seems to reflect that idealogically their systems aim at gender equality and the supply of female labor force is urgent for the maintenance of national economic power. Main factors influencing gender equality are ‘economic power & empowerment’, ‘sound birth & social capital’ and ‘life expectancy’. The first factor implies that the government’s policy should be focused on women’s longer education period and more to get jobs, and beyond the level of simply employed status, ensuring the sufficient level of income and the environment of an equal opportunity for women to assume high positions making important decision and be equipped with speciality. The remaining factors indicates that the government also keeps in mind the importance of issues of fertility category such as maternal health and adolescent pregnancy, extending the life of the women and the environment of building social relationship.