Women are 57% of the workforce at Korea's apparel firms and 8% at its steelmakers

Ask how many women work in Korea’s listed companies and the market-wide answer is unremarkable: the median firm reports that women are 23.8% of its staff. Ask where they work and the picture splits in two. The female share of the workforce is not spread evenly across the economy — it is concentrated, industry by industry, into a pattern so sharp it barely looks like one labour market.

Majority-women sectors, single-digit ones

Sort the 2,534 listed companies with 30 or more employees by industry and read the median female share in each:

• Apparel — 57.4%. Film, video and audio production — 57.3%. Retail trade — 54.8%. Professional services — 52.2%. Research and development — 52.0%.
• At the other end: pulp and paper 8.2%, basic metals 8.3%, motor vehicles 9.3%, other transport equipment 9.5%, non-metallic minerals 9.9%, building construction 10.7%.

The gap between the top and bottom is about seven to one. In the industries that make clothes, media, retail and research, women are a majority of the workforce. In the ones that make steel, cars, ships, cement and buildings, they are fewer than one in ten. The market-wide “24%” is not a typical workplace — it is the midpoint of two very different worlds.

What the split is, and is not

This is the share of headcount, not of seniority or pay, and the distinction matters. As earlier pieces showed, a high female share does not narrow a company’s gender pay gap, because the gap lives in which rungs people stand on, not how many women are in the building. A sector can be 57% female and still concentrate its women in its lower-paid roles. So this map answers a narrower question than it seems to: not “where are women paid best,” but simply “where do women work.”

The figure is a median — the typical firm in each industry — chosen because female share is skewed across companies and the median is the robust representative value for a skewed distribution, where an average would be pulled by outliers. This is a description of Korea’s listed workforce, not a judgement of any company and not investment advice. What it shows is plain and stark: in Korea, an industry’s product predicts its gender mix almost better than anything else, and the distance between the sewing floor and the steel mill is sevenfold.

Related — where this shows up

• Women’s workforce share: firm choice or sector mix? — does the rank measure the employer or the industry?