Professor Dong Seong (Don) Lee’s (Graduate School of Governance / Department of Public Administration)'s research introduced in the Washington Post

Professor Lee has published a co-authored article in COMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES (ranked top 8% among SSCI journals), titled “Breaking the Cabinet’s Glass Ceiling: The Gendered Effect of Political Experience in Presidential Democracies. The research examines whether women face discrimination in their political careers after their initial cabinet appointment.

With new data on the careers of all 1,374 ministers who have held office in the major presidential democracies in Asia, including the 515 ministers who have served in Korea since the 1988 democratization, he tests for gendered patterns in “cabinet promotions”—instances where a president approves the transfer of a minister from their initial appointment to a higher-prestige executive post, one with access to greater power and financial resources.

Overall, the results show that male and female cabinet ministers experience surprisingly similar promotion rates. At first glance, this may indicate that most gender discrimination occurs at the appointment stage and that afterward, there is more gender parity. However, while the overall promotion rates may be similar across genders, there are significant differential effects of political experience on the likelihood of men and women receiving a promotion. For female ministers, having a political background increases the chance of promotion by 17 percentage points more than it does for male ministers. The political experience thus matters much more for women’s upward mobility in cabinets than men.

This research was introduced in the Washington Post (Post) as an article titled “South Korea’s new leader says there’s no gender inequality problem,” which links to the Post’s recent interview with South Korea’s president-elect, Yoon Suk-yeol. According to the article posted in the Post, in contrast to Yoon’s assertion that systemic gender inequality is “a thing of the past” in his country, significant gender discrimination exists in presidential cabinets in South Korea, as shown by Professor Lee’s research findings. The Post’s article concludes that the South Korean cabinets may become more balanced over time as more women gain cabinet positions. But that will be only feasible when presidents place more excellent value on having a gender balance in their cabinet and empowering gateway ministries, such as a women’s affairs ministry, to help more women initiate and build their cabinet careers.