Two Different Glass Ceilings: Gender Dynamics in South Korea vs. Spain

🇰🇷 South Korea · 🇪🇸 Spain

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

South Korea has the widest gender pay gap in the entire OECD — 29.3% among full-time workers in 2023, against an OECD average of 11.4% — while Spain, on paper, looks like a country that solved most of this decades ago, at least in its enormous public sector. The gap between the two countries isn't really about how progressive either one sounds in a company handbook; it's about where, specifically, the inequality hides.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇷 South Korea

🇪🇸 Spain

Korea's gap is structural and starts early. Even among recent college graduates, where you'd expect near-parity, a 2026-era study found a conditional wage gap of around 4%, small compared to the 29.3% headline figure but still present at the very first rung. The real widening happens afterward: pay and career progression for regular workers has long been tied heavily to tenure, according to the OECD's 2026 Economic Survey of Korea, which flags that this seniority-based system actively discourages motherhood, since a career break resets the tenure clock. The numbers bear this out — 23.8% of female workers were classified as low-wage earners in 2024, more than double the rate for men, and only 6.8% of fathers eligible for parental leave in one recent birth cohort actually used it, against 70% of mothers. Add hoesik culture — the after-hours team dinners involving multiple rounds of drinking, which the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family has identified as the setting for the largest share of workplace sexual harassment cases in recent years — and the picture is of a system where formal policy and informal pressure pull in opposite directions.

Spain's inequality is more sector-specific. The civil service has more female employees than male ones and offers real pay parity, per reporting from The Local's coverage of Spanish workplace sexism — but private-sector advancement remains harder for women, and the numbers show it: the 2026 national data put women's median salary at 84.4% of men's, and more than a quarter of female employees earned at or below the annual minimum wage in 2023, versus just over one in ten men. The gap widens further for part-time work, where hourly pay disparities are substantially larger than for full-time roles, and Spain has more involuntary part-time work than most of the EU — meaning many women aren't choosing reduced hours so much as settling for them. Spain's gender pension gap, at roughly 40%, shows how these smaller, compounding disadvantages accumulate over a full career.

The Reckoning: Korea's system pressures women out through tenure structures and social obligation — the penalty for motherhood or for skipping hoesik is career stagnation, quiet and cumulative. Spain's system pressures women through sector sorting — the public sector absorbs and protects, while the private sector, where growth and higher pay concentrate, remains the harder climb. Hofstede Insights scores Korea notably higher on long-term orientation and collectivism, consistent with a system where individual sacrifice for group cohesion (hoesik, tenure loyalty) is expected of everyone but lands disproportionately on women; Spain's more individualist, shorter-term orientation means the inequality shows up less as social obligation and more as plain compensation math. Neither country's problem is really about attitudes changing — both have made real public progress on that front — so much as about incentive structures that haven't caught up to the attitudes.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

thelocal.es — A piece examining whether Spanish workplaces are sexist noted there's far more equality in the civil service, with more female than male civil servants, but concluded that climbing the ladder in a private company is still noticeably harder for women — a split that surprises newcomers who assume the whole country operates on one standard.

Quora — A respondent answering a question about how women are treated in South Korean culture said that despite visible modernization in cities like Seoul, traditional gender-role expectations remain prevalent underneath, particularly once marriage or children enter the picture.

Quora — Someone tracing the roots of Korea's gender inequality pointed to the country's Confucian legacy, describing it as heavily male-centered and built around strict social hierarchy — a historical throughline that respondents said still shapes who gets promoted and who's expected to step back.

teamblind.com — In a thread discussing feminist movements and workplace backlash in Korea, posters described a genuinely polarized environment where advocating openly for gender equity at work could invite pushback from colleagues — a tension foreign hires said they hadn't expected walking in.

Conclusion

If you're a woman moving to South Korea for work, the practical move is to interrogate the tenure system and the hoesik calendar before you sign — those are where the real cost lands, not in the job description. If you're moving to Spain, the move is to be precise about which sector and which company you're joining, since "Spain" as a single data point flattens a genuinely large gap between public and private experience. Priya's honest read: both countries will tell you, accurately, that things have improved — the trick is asking improved compared to what, and for whom, before you accept the offer.