South Korea vs UK: The World's Worst Glass Ceiling, and Britain's Nicely Varnished One

🇰🇷 South Korea · 🇬🇧 UK

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

South Korea's gender pay gap has been the widest in the OECD for every one of the twenty-nine years the organisation has kept score, currently sitting at 29.3 percent against an OECD average of 11.3 percent. Britain, meanwhile, has spent a decade quietly filling its boardrooms with women until they occupy 43 percent of FTSE 350 seats, a target hit ahead of schedule. And yet this month it was South Korea's president, not Britain's prime minister, who went on social media to publicly threaten a Swedish furniture retailer over a single employee's parental leave demotion. The two countries have built almost opposite systems for managing the same basic problem, and neither one has actually solved it.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇷 South Korea

🇬🇧 UK

South Korea

The headline number is almost cartoonishly bad: Korean women earned 29 percent less than men on average in 2024, according to the Korean Women's Development Institute, a gap that has narrowed from 34.1 percent in 2018 but still leaves the country dead last among OECD economies, a distinction it has held since joining the organisation in 1996 ([OECD Ecoscope](https://oecdecoscope.blog/2025/09/18/reaching-equal-pay-a-pending-job/); [Korea Herald](https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10564875)). Women make up 39.6 percent of the private-sector workforce but just 24.1 percent of managerial roles and 6.7 percent of registered directors at listed companies, and Korea has ranked last on the Economist's glass-ceiling index for thirteen consecutive years ([Korea Times](https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2025/02/113_370288.html)). A February 2026 survey of 1,000 workers by the labour rights group Workplace Gapjil 119 found 60.7 percent believe gender affects hiring and promotion decisions, and among women specifically, 67.5 percent said they had personally experienced workplace gender discrimination, against 47.6 percent of men ([Korea Herald](https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10739511)).

Much of this traces to what happens after childbirth rather than at hiring. More than four in ten career-interrupted Korean women have been out of the workforce for a decade or more, and family formation accounts for roughly 90 percent of those exits, with a single year of parental leave translating into a permanent step down the ladder relative to peers who never paused. The legal backstop is thin: employers who violate maternity leave requirements face fines as low as five million won, about $3,600, and Korea remains one of only eight countries without a comprehensive anti-discrimination law. That gap between law and practice was on public display this month, when President Lee Jae-myung personally warned IKEA Korea over allegations it demoted a returning parental-leave employee to a non-managerial role and pressured them to resign, calling the practice an "outdated management" import that "cannot be tolerated" — a presidential tweet standing in for the enforcement infrastructure the country otherwise lacks ([Korea Herald](https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10805004)).

UK

Britain's numbers look, on paper, considerably tamer. The gender pay gap among full-time employees was 6.9 percent in April 2025, down from 7.1 percent the year before, and the gap across all employees fell to 12.8 percent; among part-time staff, women actually out-earned men by 2.9 percent ([ONS](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/genderpaygapintheuk/2025)). Boardrooms have moved even faster: women now hold 43 percent of FTSE 350 board seats, up from 12.5 percent a decade ago, comfortably clearing the government's 40-percent-by-2025 target ([FTSE Women Leaders](https://ftsewomenleaders.com/progress/)). Companies with 250 or more staff must publish their gap annually, which is more transparency than most economies manage.

But the senior numbers tell a quieter story: women hold just 8 percent of FTSE 350 CEO roles and 17 percent of Chair positions, meaning the diversity gains have concentrated heavily at non-executive board level rather than in the operational chain of command ([ICAEW](https://www.icaew.com/insights/viewpoints-on-the-news/2025/mar-2025/ftse350-women-leaders-review-highlights-progress)). And the mechanism doing the damage isn't overt exclusion so much as procedural erosion after maternity leave: research summarised by Harvard Business Review documents women returning to find their client accounts quietly reassigned to colleagues who don't even know the relationships were built by someone else, and a UK survey by &Culture found 51 percent of employees reported a negative experience returning from maternity leave, with more than a quarter leaving within a year of coming back. It is, structurally, a country whose Masculinity score on Hofstede's cultural framework sits at 66 — a genuinely competitive, achievement-oriented culture — against Korea's 39, which nominally marks it as the more "feminine," consensus-driven society. The scores measure something closer to workplace ethos than lived gender equality, and the mismatch between Korea's low masculinity score and its abysmal outcomes for women is instructive on its own.

The Reckoning

Here is the paradox worth sitting with: the country that scores as culturally "feminine" produces the OECD's worst gender pay gap, while the culturally "masculine," competitive one produces a full-time pay gap under 7 percent. Hofstede's dimension was never meant to predict equality outcomes, and the two countries make that plain — Korea's problem is closer to a legal and structural vacuum than a values one, while Britain's is closer to a values problem hiding inside an unusually good paper trail.

That difference in visibility matters more than the raw numbers for anyone actually deciding where to work. Korea's dysfunction is loud, quantified, and occasionally embarrassing enough to summon a presidential tweet — you will know almost immediately where you stand, because everyone around you already does. Britain's dysfunction is procedural: a missed handover here, a role "restructured" there, wrapped in enough HR language and boardroom statistics that it takes years of tenure to notice the pattern. One country hands you a bad number on day one. The other hands you a good number and lets you discover the real one privately, usually right after you get back from leave.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Raconteur (expat interview, Seoul) — A marketer in her second year in Korea found the corporate dinners the hardest adjustment: skipping the weekly hoesik, even for a legitimate reason, is read as bad manners, and the unspoken rule against taking more than four consecutive days off meant her statutory leave allowance was more theoretical than actual.

Raconteur (expat interview, Seoul) — Being a foreigner turned out to be a strange advantage: colleagues extended her more latitude in meetings than they gave to Korean women her own age, who she watched struggle for the same basic respect she received by default.

Quartz (first-person feature) — A Korean woman who returned home after studying abroad described overcompensating for months to prove she was "really Korean" to new coworkers, concluding that being female already worked against her at a domestic firm, and any hint of having been Westernised made the climb even steeper.

Harvard Business Review (case study, UK) — A manager was promised her client accounts back after maternity leave. She returned to find they had been quietly reassigned, and the colleague who inherited them didn't know she had built those relationships in the first place.

&Culture / HBR research summary — Employees describing UK return-to-work meetings after maternity leave used words like gaslighting and forced masking; the advice repeated most often afterward was to get every promise about role, clients and reporting lines in writing before going on leave, not after coming back.

Conclusion

If you're weighing these two on paper alone, Britain wins on almost every published metric — smaller pay gap, more board seats, actual disclosure requirements. But the metric that should matter most to someone relocating is not the gap itself, it's who is watching it. Korea's gap is so large and so publicly tracked that a single case can reach the president's desk within days; Britain's gap is small enough, and buried in enough procedure, that the erosion mostly happens to one person at a time, quietly, with no one required to notice. Choose Korea if you want your problem visible, communal, and occasionally the subject of national outrage. Choose Britain if you want your problem private, well-documented, and entirely yours to solve.

Either way: read the parental leave policy before you sign, not after you need it, and if a colleague tells you a promise was made verbally, assume it wasn't made at all.