Votes for women: South Korea’s first feminist party seeks parliament seats

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.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. 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. Former UFP presidential candidate Hong Joon-pyo admitted in his memoirs that at university he supplied a stimulant to a friend who tried to drug and have sex with a female student. In 2019, a provincial governor from the Democratic party who used to proclaim himself a feminist was convicted and jailed for raping a female aide.

But the party’s Kim said winning isn’t impossible. “Thousands of women joined our party within the first week,” she said. “I believe in young women’s collective wish to live a dignified life.”

Source: DJ