The better a Korean company pays, the wider its gender gap

We have measured two things about the Korean gender pay gap already: that it sits near 73% market-wide, and that hiring more women does not close it. Here is a third, and it is the most counterintuitive of the set. The gap is not worst at the struggling, low-wage end of the market. It is worst at the top.

The ladder steepens as pay rises

Sort the 2,530 listed companies with 30 or more staff by their average pay per head, and read the median gender ratio in each band:

• Under 50m won a head: 75.0%
• 50–70m: 74.4%
• 70–90m: 72.3%
• 90–120m: 70.2%
• Over 120m: 69.7%

Every step down the ratio lines up with a step up in pay. The best-paying employers — the ones a worker most wants to join — are precisely the ones where the average woman falls furthest behind the average man. From the lowest pay band to the highest the gap widens by about five points, and it does so without a single reversal.

Why the good jobs have the wide gaps

The mechanism is the same one that runs underneath every version of this number: the gap is about which rungs people stand on, and high-paying firms have taller ladders. A company that pays a head-office average of 120m won is usually one with a deep hierarchy of senior engineers, executives and specialists — roles that are disproportionately held by men, and that pull the male average sharply upward. A firm paying 45m has a flatter structure with less room at the top for the averages to separate. So the very thing that makes an employer attractive — a long, well-paid career ladder — is the thing that makes its average gender gap wide. Finance and heavy manufacturing, the market’s best payers, are also where the ratio is lowest.

What this is, and what it is not

This is a description of averages, not of pay for equal work, and it is not investment advice — a wide gap here is not a mark against a company any more than a narrow one is a mark for it. It is also not independent of company size: higher-paying firms tend to be larger, so this cut and a size-based one lean the same way rather than confirming each other twice. What the data shows, cleanly and without exception across the pay bands, is a pattern worth holding onto: in Korea the gender pay gap is not a low-wage problem that money would fix. The higher a company’s pay, the further its women sit from its men — because the gap lives in the shape of the ladder, and the best-paying ladders are the steepest.