KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

Abstract

Korean Women Manager Panel

 

Seung-hyun Lee

Woo-ri Shin

Joo-young Lee

So-young Kwon

Woo-ri Noh

Kyung-ju Kang

Hee-jeong Yim

Keun-tae Kim

Nan-jue Kim

Geon-pyo Park

 

The Korean Women Manager Panel Survey(KWMP) was initiated to attain largely two purposes. First, it aimed to meet the need for monitoring various situations and discrimination women experienced in the labor market. Second, it aimed to present the necessity and grounds for a policy to expand women managers. The KWMP is the only survey at home and abroad that observes female managers’ turn in office and growth process in the enterprises to identify their actual working situations, career development, working conditions in the enterprise, organizational culture, practices and obstacles for them to become managers. The KWMP is very distinctive because it is impossible for similar surveys to keep track of individual female managers’ entry to the labor market until they drop out of the market.

Since its first survey in 2007, the Korean Women Manager Panel Survey has tracked the current human capital of female managers in the private enterprises as well as their working conditions for the past 12 years. The main users of this survey include researchers in the academic community and research institutes, and policy makers in the government ministries. In other words, the KWMP has been used by researchers and policy-makers as rudimentary data on the issues of Korean women’s glass ceiling in the enterprises, the roles of enterprises and society related to women’s career break, and the determinants of female manager’s promotion. To share the survey results and spread its achievements, the KWMP has made public its survey data, hosted symposiums nine times, forums four times, and academic conferences twice, and released every year on its homepage its analysis reports, and studies and papers that have used its survey data.

 

The KWMP has surveyed both women managers and human resource staff working at businesses with 100 employees or more across all industries in Korea. By surveying HR staff at the enterprises, the survey could collect in-depth data of the enterprises, including their general conditions, human resources, personnel management system, and flexible work arrangements, to raise its usefulness as well as its practical and academic value. Also, the survey identified many cases of women managers dropping out of the panel due to their retirement during the seven surveys from 2007 to 2018. This realistically showed the difficulties Korean women had undergone to retain their career. In other words, the KWMP is a survey of great value as policy source data whose policy use will increase in the future when used in connection with policies on the promotion of women’s representation.

 

The 2021 Korean Women Manager Panel Survey of this year conducted its second main survey for the second-cycle KWMP that was newly planned in 2019. Focusing on competencies and roles of new managers that are required in the currently changing labor market, the second-cycle survey tracks the career path through which women managers achieve career success in the organization. The purpose of the second-cycle survey is to identify the current state of women’s participation in the labor market, to produce rudimentary policy data to secure diversity in the labor market, and to build up basic data to analyze various changes in women’s labor related to social changes.

 

All the planned content of the second-cycle KWMP can be summed up largely into four points: First, the survey content is so designed as to present ways for women’s achieving success, focusing on women’s individual competencies that directly affect their career retention and success. Second, the survey subjects include male and female managers ranging from workers in the position of manager to board members. Third, the survey established a new panel of 5,011 persons, including 3,500 female managers and 1,511 male managers to enable a comparative analysis of female and male managers. Fourth, the survey is conducted every year to raise the panel retention rate and to be performed in a stable manner, and only online and mobile surveys are used for the survey methods considering the COVID-19 pandemic situation.

 

Main tasks of the 21 Korean Women Manager Panel Survey encompass the following: we hosted workshops, held a kick-off meeting, improved and complemented the survey content, performed preliminary surveys, held an interim report meeting, completed the approval of changes in statistics from Statistics Korea, conducted the main survey of the new panel of 5,011 persons and the HR staff of 604 persons, hosted forums (twice) and expert symposiums, managed and publicized the Korean Women Manager Panel homepage, and revised the first-cycle survey data. This year’s main survey was conducted of the male and female panel of 5,011 managers and the 604 HR staff as established in 2020. Applying the two-phase sampling method, the panel was selected from the population of the National Business Survey prepared as of the end of December 2020. For the survey content, we used the questionnaire that was improved and complemented this year.

 

According to the analysis of the data of the survey conducted in 2020, personal traits of the second-cycle panel of male and female managers were found to be considerably different depending on the gender. It was also found that their current situations in the organization and career development were significantly different depending on the gender. As such, users are expected to make active use of the data on the second-cycle male and female managers according to the purposes of using the data. Using the data on the HR staff who responded to the second-cycle survey, we examined the general conditions of the second-cycle panel businesses, their human resource management, the way they work and their corporate culture, maternity and paternity protection and work-life balance system, and human resource situations. The data on the HR staff have the strength of enabling us to analyze the data containing diverse characteristics of 604 businesses with 100 employees or more across the industries in the nation together with the data on the male and female managers. For this reason, the HR staff data are expected to raise the use of the second-cycle data in the future.

 

According to the analysis of issue questions about post-COVID situation in the enterprises, female managers showed more passive and negative tendencies than their male counterparts regarding the introduction of flexible work arrangements and changes in the businesses after the outbreak of COVID-19. They also expressed their feelings about difficulties due to added burden of child rearing and care. As such, it is judged that while it was already hard to find women in the position of manager above even prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, this difficult situation is likely to worsen due to the COVID situation. Though the government urged businesses to introduce and use flexible work arrangements including working from home as a strategy for coping with the pandemic, female managers experienced the biggest challenge in childrearing and care. Therefore, this is the most urgent issue that the government should prepare ways to resolve in the long term.

 

According to the comparative analysis of the first-cycle and second-cycle panels through in-depth analysis, the second-cycle panel was significantly different from the first-cycle panel in that there increased the proportion of high-ranking women in the position of manager or above in the second-cycle panel. From the aspect of business panel, we established the panel to sufficiently reflect realities by greatly raising the representation of businesses through sampling that considered the business size, distribution of business types, and location of the business. From the aspect of male and female manager panel, sampling was done to sufficiently suit the purpose of the second-cycle survey that aimed to track the process of intermediate-level managers growing to be executives. In particular, we attained the goal of composing a highly representative panel that objectively displays characteristics of men and women in the intermediate-level managers or above in education level, marital status, age, and rank.

 

According to the result of the in-depth analysis of relevant themes, we made the following suggestions for data supplementation and improvement. First, the HR staff data from the first-wave secondcycle survey was useful in analyzing the relations between variables as they provided various items of information. However, because there was a missing value in some of the question items used for the analysis, the survey should be managed in the direction of reducing non-response to question items as much as possible to enhance reliability of the analysis in the future. Second, to promote the use of these data, it is necessary to complement the data so as to enable sampling of human resources from particular areas by securing additional information, including major of study, education level, and type of occupation. Third, questions about male and female managers’ recollection in the first-wave second-cycle data were useful as they provided various information. Regrettably, however, they lacked information on the quality of job. Fourth, it is necessary to specify the structure of questions about the point in time of using childcare leave, and to ask questions about family planning by dividing them into married and unmarried respondents.

 

Research areas: Panel, Labor·employment, Representation

Keywords: Women manager, Men manager, Women representation, Women's career development, Panel survey