Hiring more women does not narrow Korea's gender pay gap

There is an intuition worth testing: a company with lots of women ought to pay women better. More women should mean women in more of the roles, including the senior ones, and a narrower gap between the average man’s pay and the average woman’s. Korea’s filings let you check it directly, and the intuition is wrong.

The gap that will not move

Take the 2,530 listed companies with at least 30 employees that report both their female workforce share and their pay by gender. Sort them by how female they are and read off the median pay ratio in each band. It hardly changes:

• Under 10% women: 71.2%
• 10–20%: 73.8%
• 20–30%: 73.5%
• 30–40%: 74.4%
• 40–60%: 74.1%
• Over 60% women: 73.1%

From the most male-dominated firms to the majority-female ones, the median woman is paid somewhere around 73% of the median man — a span of about three points across the entire range. Split the market into quartiles by female share and the least-female quarter pays a 71.7% ratio, the most-female quarter 73.6%. Representation, at the level a company can report, simply is not the lever that moves the gap.

Why a headcount can’t fix a ladder

The reason follows from what the gap actually is. As covered when we first measured it, the market-wide 73% ratio is not unequal pay for the same work; it is the distance between two company-wide averages, driven by who sits where — how far up the seniority and pay ladder the average woman has climbed relative to the average man. Adding women at the bottom of that ladder raises the headcount without raising the average position. A firm can be 60% female and still concentrate its women in its lower-paid, shorter-tenured roles, which is exactly what the flat line says most of them do.

What this is, and what it is not

This is a cross-section of what companies file, not a verdict on any of them and not investment advice — nothing here rewards or penalises a company for its female share or its pay ratio. Nor is it a claim about cause: it does not show what happens inside one firm as it hires more women over time, only that, across the market today, firms with many women and firms with few post nearly the same average gap. The useful takeaway is narrow and firm: in Korea the gender pay gap is a question of which rungs people stand on, not how many of them are in the building — so counting women in the door tells you almost nothing about how far the pay gap has closed.