We viewed that the Korean government needs to join ILO Convention Nos. 87 and 98 to
fulfill its promise to the international community to ratify the fundamental ILO conventions and
to realize Korea's constitutional values through guaranteeing basic labor rights defined in the
Constitution.
J. Recommending That Broadcasting Companies Achieve Gender Equality
Policies
On December 14, we recommended that the Korea Communications Commission
Chairperson amend related laws and statutes to include provisions about restricting both genders
from accounting for more than 60% when appointing members of the Korea Communications
Commission and Korea Communications Standards Commission and board members of
public broadcasting companies to ensure gender-balanced participation in the decision-making
processes in the broadcasting industry.
In order to help broadcasting companies assess their own gender equality status and
shortcomings, we recommended adding gender-equality items to broadcaster assessments to
assess the gender ratio of each broadcaster's management and giving additional marks for its
effort to achieve gender equality.
To prevent the reproduction of gender biases through broadcasting, we recommended that
broadcasters expand media diversity survey items by including the genre of talk-shows on
current affairs, etc.; introducing qualitative assessment methods such as the gender-specific
analysis of roles played by characters; and summarizing the results of media diversity surveys
and distributing the summary to broadcasting content producers for reference.
We recommended that the Korea Communications Standards Committee Chairperson
establish a special committee on gender equality as a consultative body for monitoring broadcast
programs, identifying cases that reproduced gender-based biases, and proposing improvement
ideas.
We conducted the Factual Survey on Gender Discrimination Committed by the Media in 2017
to investigate the positions of women as described on television and verified that jobs and roles
occupied by male and female characters were still affected by gender biases. In response, we
recognized the need to ensure greater participation of women across all areas and eliminate such
gender biases.
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Commission's Major Activities