KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

The current government aims to reach the goal of a 70% employment rate through the creation of employment for youth and women with the public sector (the government and public agencies) at the center. It wants to achieve this goal through the prevention of women's career disruption and a policy for supporting the coexistence of work and family. If we look at the different career stages of women workers in the labor market, the prevention of women's career disruption and a policy on work-family coexistence -- particularly for maternity leave and a family duty system, etc., for workers who are caring for infants — can become an important policy.

However, on the ground, the utilization rate of substitute workers to fill in the vacuum during maternity leave is 5.5%, which is considerably insufficient. The low use of substitute workers in policies to support maternity leave and work-family coexistence forms a hindering, linked, and vicious circle.

The important result of this research's analysis is the finding that in public agencies, business gaps that occur because of maternity leave, etc., are handled through introducing new substitute workers or adding to other colleagues' workloads. Moreover, the most frequent way of handling maternity leave was to burden other colleagues, but there was no compensation for them. Because of this result, there is a basis for measures to establish extra pay by vitalizing the use of substitute workers to act as proxies, and we suggest that public agencies establish management systems exclusively for substitute workers, etc.