Daily Times

South Korea is regularly ranked lowest in the developed world for gender equality, but for the first time a feminist party is seeking parliamentary seats at Wednesday’s election, accusing the political establishment of having failed women.

The party was founded last month on International Women’s Day on the back of a surge of anger over the country’s spycam porn epidemic and other crimes, and against a backdrop of an enduring pay gap and employment and childcare issues.

But it has a mountain to climb.

It has put forward four candidates in the proportional representation section of the vote, and to secure a single seat will need three percent of the popular vote.

“I had signed petitions, I participated in rallies against sexual violence against women, but realised it wasn’t going to work. So I’ve decided to go to the National Assembly,” said Kim Ju-hee, one of the four, who at 25 is among the youngest candidates in the whole election.

The party has about 10,000 members — around three-quarters of them in their 20s — and Kim says she will never marry nor have children in her efforts to fight patriarchy.

But with the party unlikely to attract male voters, the threshold means it needs to secure the backing of six percent of all women.

It is an ambitious goal when the South’s two major parties — the ruling left-leaning Democratic party and the conservative main opposition United Future Party (UFP) — and their satellite entities dominate the political system.

And single-issue parties have long struggled. “For many women, it’s hard to support a party only because it deals with women’s issues,” acknowledged Kwon Soo-hyun, president of Korea Women’s Political Solidarity, a rights organisation.

Chai Hyun-jung, a 33-year-old mother who works in Seoul, said she would vote for a party that offered solid pledges on children’s education and tackling the South’s sky-high housing prices.

“I have too many other responsibilities in my life to solely focus on gender issues,” she told AFP.

“Of course I’m angry about cyber sexual violence, but I’m sceptical giving a single seat to a feminist party can actually lead to a significant difference.”

Glass ceiling

Despite its economic and technological advances, South Korea remains socially traditional and patriarchal, and has one of the world’s thickest glass ceilings for women.

It has the highest gender wage gap in the OECD club of developed economies, and only 3.6 percent of Korean conglomerates’ board members are female. Similarly in politics, women make up just 17 percent of assembly seats in the outgoing parliament — 125th in a global ranking maintained by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, just behind North Korea in 120th place. agencies