NHRCK, analysis on the age of anchors hosting evening news programs of
terrestrial and cable TV networks found that a majority of anchorwomen are in
their 20s and 30s while a majority of anchormen are in their 40s and 50s. Gender
and job imbalance is also serious as for news reporters and interviewers. The sex
ratio of news reporters and interviewers is 3:7, indicating that the number of
men is more than twice larger than that of women. By jobs, professional female
interviewers are 5.8% while the figure is 20.8% for professional male interviewers.
This means that when there are 100 interviewers on the new, 25 of them are
professionals out of which 20 are men and five are women. The gender
imbalance is also serious in the number of hosts and panels of talk program on
current events with 90% of men and merely 10% of women.
96. Gender imbalance in media is related to the gender imbalance in the media
workforce. According to data from the Ministry of Employment and Labor40, the
female proportion of the total press workforce was as low as 16% in 2015. The
Journalists Association of Korea41 researched the sex distribution of journalists at
broadcasters (KBS, MBC, SBS, YTN) in 2016 and found a serious gender
imbalance with 81.4% of men and 18.6% of women. The proportion of women
decreases drastically with a longer length of service as the female proportion of
journalists with 21 years of experience or longer is about five percent while the
figure is 38.9% for journalists with one to five years of experience. In addition, as
for first to third groups of panels in broadcasting regulators, three out of 27
panels are women at the Korea Communications Standards Commission and
only one out of 15 panels at the Korea Communications Commission. It is hard
to find a female director at KBS, MBC and EBS as well. It is urgently needed to
develop measures for gender equality in media.
[25] Need for Measures for Households Composed of Single Women including
Housing Support
40 Re-quotation from “Female proportion of 16% at media companies, is discrimination to blame?” Kim Do-yeon
<Media Today> (July 4th, 2015)
41 “Who is Korea’s TV news reporter of 2016?” <TV News Reporter>. Vol. 29, pp 6-9, TV News Reporter Editing
Commission (2016)