Current situation 12. The last administration set up the ‘Employment Rate 70% Roadmap’ and carried out various policies including ‘Lifecycle Career Management Support Plan for Female Workers’ as a major government project with an aim of increasing women’s employment rate by ten per cent point. However, the result was proven insufficient. The rate of increase in women’s employment has remained only at 2.3 per cent point in 2016 and it has been much lower than the rate of increase in men’s employment at approximately 20 per cent point since 2013. The employment rate for women came in the 29th place out of 35 OECD member countries in 2015. <Table 1> Employment rates by gender (Ages 15~64) since 2011 Gender/Year 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 (Unit: %) 2016. 11. Men 74.5 74.9 74.9 75.7 75.7 75.8 Women 53.1 53.5 53.9 54.9 55.7 56.2 (Source: Economically Active Population Survey, National Statistical Office, 2016) 13. The rates of employment between the ages 20 and 29 for both men and women are similar at around 59 per cent; however, the gender imbalance becomes greater at an alarming rate after the age 30. This is believed to be due to women’s career break for the childbirth and child care reasons. The rate of employment for men in the 30s increases rapidly to 90 per cent. On the contrary, the rate of employment for women in the 30s decreases, and then increases again in the 40s displaying the M shape. However, the jobs for women in the 40s are mostly irregular positions and low-quality jobs compared to the jobs they had in the 20s or jobs for men. 14. Particularly, the low economic participation of highly-educated women raises a serious problem. The college entrance rate among women was higher (74.6 per cent) than men (67.6 per cent) in 2015, and more women than men entered both two-year junior colleges and four-year universities. According to the ‘Statistical Yearbook of Education’ (2016) by the Korean Educational Development Institute, the rate of women’s tertiary education (higher education from junior college and above) is the highest among the OECD member countries. Although the employment rate of highly-educated women changed from the L shape in 2011 to the M shape in 2015, their return-to-work rates are lower 5