Abstract

Korean Women Manager Panel 2019
Type Basic Period 2019
Manager Eunjin Oh Date 2020-03-03
Fiie 5. Korean Women Manager Panal 2019.pdf ( 877.27 KB )

Abstract

 

Korean Women Manager Panel

 

Eunjin Oh

Nanjue Kim

Seunghyun Lee

Jihyun Hong

Seohyun Lee

Woori Noh

Keejae Lee

 

Korean Women Manager Panel has continuously surveyed changes in organizational culture of Korean work places, gender discriminatory practices against women, and juggernaut between work and family. By performing longitudinal studies on female managers, the panel has strived to analyze how the Korean society has changed over the last decade, what success and barrier factors have affected for women to get promotion to manager position, and which role and meaning they have had in society, work place, and family. The women manager forum believes that such striving efforts produced diverse meanings and achievements. In particular, multidisciplinary researchers have utilized the panel’s data to explore the role of businesses and society with regard to women- related issues, including of glass ceiling and career interruption. Those materials have served as underlying information for the preparation of polices that were designed to help women strike a balance between work and family and related to women representativeness.

 

Recently, changing labor markets called for various changes to the women manager panel’s planning and operation where some of its early days’ practices are still found. Labor market network changes, including of the fourth industrial revolution, have triggered managers to alter their identity, and existing as well as emerging industries are in need of a brand new type of administrators. Through thorough examination on those panel data that finished collecting in 2018, until the seventh wave, the 2019 manager panel study largely focuses on ways of redesigning the manager panel for the years to come. For that, it examined the problem of the current panel, the need of additional panel for lost one, and the issue of analytical data that cannot be sufficiently utilized for women manager representativeness study. To that end, a total of 11 expert forums by topic and one symposium were held on various themes: whether or not to continue with the existing panel and how to operate it; how far the tracing of quitters from the panel would go; which questions to survey, among others. Regarding academic accomplishment up to now, the panel released 75 research outcomes in academic conferences and symposiums, reported 63 papers published by academic research foundations, and held six symposiums and two academic conferences. All of these demonstrate that the panel’s activities and outcomes have been useful and practical. Moreover, diverse policy studies cited the result of women manager panel’s research or utilized its raw data to understand different issues, for example, low birth rate, women representativeness, and female manager education, and make relevant proposals. The panel can be said to have been providing basic data to the women manager representativeness through research support. But, still, there are some limitations: the panel regards those sitting at levels of assistant manager as managers; it took disproportionately greater portions of data from the initial four industries (the manufacturing, the wholesale and retail, the financial, and the enterprise service), with which those studies began in 2007, though the coverage already expanded to all industries in 2012. In addition, there are relatively higher panel drop-out rates. This is because Korean women in their 30s see their career interrupted, which leads to quitting from the panel. The fact that their panel cannot be replaced with another, unlike household panel, brought about tracing failure and rejection, and this largely increased such quitting rates. All of these deem limitations that hinder the panel from being maintained.

 

A new survey on the women manager panel, soon to be formed, was conceived out of the recognition of the dire reality that though women take more than 20% of managerial positions, they still just end up in occupying a meager 2.3% of executive status. In its first round, the survey rather put focus on the process before women becoming managers and the process of their becoming managers. In the second round, it will investigate the process of women managers walking towards higher managers or executives as well as other influential factors, including individual’s capability and social relation, career development and management, and gender discrimination and barriers. In addition, in order to more clearly analyze and better utilize the result of the second round survey, those involved plan to build a new panel and conduct another survey on male managers. On top of that, they want to complement and modify survey methodology for a better research management. Women managers will be defined as those whose position is manager or above, and, for the purpose of comparison analysis, survey on male managers will also be carried out. Furthermore, survey interval could be changed into one year, with the current survey form divided into two modules. Through this, in two-year rotation, the first year can investigate a set of survey details and items, and the second execute another set of survey questions and analysis details.

 

Besides, instead of the existing data source of KIS-line, the business database of Nice Information Service Co., Ltd, the study will use the directory of a national business survey of Statistics Korea as a sampling source. Doing this makes it available to examine more companies than before and renders it easier to secure a sampling group of women whose position is manager or above.

 

Investigation details will be changed in consideration of how well survey is used and which environmental change takes places in the labor market. Major changes that are anticipated in the coming days are as follows. 1) The questionnaire for those who transfer to other work place will use that for those retained at the time of survey.

 

2) A person in charge of human resources of the company from which a job transfer takes place will be chosen as an object of investigation and thus will be surveyed.

 

3) The questionnaire for male managers will use the same question and format with that for those retained at the time of survey.

 

4) Add questions that ask about respondent’s experiences while on the path to her current position and in relation to career development.

 

5) Regarding questionnaires for those who will not pursue career, those who will run a startup, and those who will work in not-specified careers, a follow-up study was planned to be conducted only once before termination. Another questionnaire for drop-outs will ask common questions, and respondents will check their current situation only.

 

Changes in questions were made in the following ways.

- First, questions which deemed not practical in terms of the policy and academic perspective were modified into other women manager panel questions, or removed.

- Second, questions which were important at the time of development, 10 years ago, yet became minor issues were replaced with other questions.

- Third, in case that questions were designed in such a way that brought in unreliable results, they were redesigned so that respondents could answer more reliably.

- Fourth, in case that subjective scale questions which had been put to reliability test showed low credibility, details of them were reviewed. Those in a same category and judged as not exclusive to each other were modified, or removed.