Effective but Uneven: Korean Development from a Gender Perspective

While the dominant analyses of the South Korean development experiences such as the developmental state and welfare developmentalism have taken little notice of gender inequalities, the gendered nature of the development process can be seen clearly in a number of ways, including: (i) in the early female-led, export-oriented industrialization (EOI) under the repressive labor regime of the 1960s and 1970s;1 (ii) in the control and manipulation of women’s reproductivity in childbearing through state intervention2 in the male-biased corporate welfare regime that has protected male workers in core industries (Razavi and Hassim 2006); (iii) in the disproportionate effects on women of the deepened flexibilization of employment and rising social insecurities in the labor market after the financial crisis in the late 1990s (Chang 2000; Cho 2000); and (iv) recently in the intersecting inequalities of gender and income in emerging welfare policies (Peng 2009, 2011; Chang 2010). In particular, the minimalized expenditure of the state on social welfare has left the costs of reproduction to be borne largely by women. In this regard, it seems plausible to view South Korea’s miracle as reliant on women’s multilayered and undervalued work.3 However, those critiques on the gender asymmetrical Korean development have tended to be rather patchy, analyzing each gendered feature of development in isolation, while in reality they are all closely interconnected.