[Part 3: Breaking through structural discrimination] ②

International human rights group examines elderly women's poverty

'Deep-rooted social pressures at work'

'Women pushed out of workforce after childbirth, child-rearing'

Calls for reform of childbirth credit, pension system

[Editor's note] South Korea's elderly income poverty rate is 2.7 times the OECD average. Older women, in particular, face harsher conditions than their male counterparts. For decades, elderly women were expected to devote themselves to family caregiving, setting aside careers outside the home. That career interruption eroded their professional identity and made financial independence difficult. In old age, many now struggle to meet basic daily needs. The Herald Business examined the structure by which the sacrifices women made in their youth are later "billed back" to them in the form of poverty and insecurity.

Bridget Sleap, senior researcher in the older people's rights division at Human Rights Watch, presents the findings of the report "Too Old and a Woman." [Human Rights Watch]
Bridget Sleap, senior researcher in the older people's rights division at Human Rights Watch, presents the findings of the report "Too Old and a Woman." [Human Rights Watch]

"We captured gendered ageism in Korean society. It is clear that older women are hitting barriers." — Bridget Sleap, senior researcher, older people's rights division, Human Rights Watch

The Herald Business conducted an email interview Wednesday with Bridget Sleap, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), who authored a report titled "Too Old and a Woman." The interview explored structural problems in Korean society as seen by a foreign researcher and sought her recommendations on the way forward.

The report, published Sept. 8, is based on in-depth interviews with 41 Korean women between the ages of 28 and 87. It identifies a structural problem in which Korean women face not only ageism but also a compounding layer of gender discrimination.

Bridget Sleap, senior researcher in the older people's rights division at Human Rights Watch. [Human Rights Watch]
Bridget Sleap, senior researcher in the older people's rights division at Human Rights Watch. [Human Rights Watch]

In the report, Sleap said her team "confirmed that deep-rooted social pressures, cultural norms and structural sexism embedded in employment practices push women out of the workforce when they marry or have children." Women who attempt to re-enter the labor market in their 40s and 50s find "a narrower range of jobs available to them than when they first entered the workforce — jobs that pay less and offer less stable employment," she added.

The new report follows last year's "Punished for Getting Older," which also examined age-related issues in Korean society.

Asked why she has continued to focus on aging in South Korea, Sleap said that while researching the impact of ageism on older workers, her team noticed that older women faced an additional set of barriers. "The women we met were experiencing not just ageism, but structural discrimination arising from the intersection of age and gender," she said.

She added that social and institutional discrimination experienced by Korean women throughout their working lives accumulates as they age, pushing them increasingly into low-wage, precarious and part-time jobs — with serious consequences for their physical and mental health. That intersection of ageism and sexism, she said, is what her research set out to examine.

Sleap said poverty among elderly women in South Korea is driven particularly by the pension gap. While acknowledging that such discrimination exists in other countries as well, she said South Korea's pension gap is "very large compared to other OECD member countries."

She noted that in 2025, women received on average 47 percent less than men in national pension old-age payments, compared with an OECD average gap of 23 percent. "Other features of the pension system that disadvantage women are also unique to South Korea," she said.

The cover of "Too Old and a Woman," published by Human Rights Watch on Sept. 8. The report was authored by Bridget Sleap, senior researcher in the older people's rights division at Human Rights Watch. [Human Rights Watch]
The cover of "Too Old and a Woman," published by Human Rights Watch on Sept. 8. The report was authored by Bridget Sleap, senior researcher in the older people's rights division at Human Rights Watch. [Human Rights Watch]

One policy Sleap singled out is the national pension childbirth credit system, which adds pension contribution periods for one parent per child born. She said that in 2025, the benefit went overwhelmingly to men. "This is because the majority of fathers are higher earners, and that is central to understanding gendered ageism in South Korea," she said.

Data from the National Pension Service bear this out: of 9,999 childbirth credit recipients at the end of 2025, 9,727 — or 97.3 percent — were men, while women accounted for just 272, or 2.7 percent.

Although the research team interviewed women across a wide age range, from their 20s to their 80s, they found no one who perceived social pressures on women to have eased.

"We did not meet any women who felt that social pressures around career breaks and child-rearing had lessened," Sleap said. "Younger women in particular more often said they were choosing not to marry or have children in order to pursue their careers — a reflection of the perception that the two ways of life are incompatible."

Sleap also warned that if such cross-generational discrimination persists, the cost will be borne by South Korean society as a whole. "If the South Korean government does not reform policies that disadvantage older women workers, there is a risk that their structural discrimination will become entrenched," she said. "South Korea risks becoming a society in which a growing share of the population is excluded not only from economic security but from full participation in social life. As the population ages, this will be a loss not just for elderly women but for all of South Korean society."

She called for reforms to both working conditions and the pension system. Sleap said she would urge the enactment of a comprehensive anti-discrimination law, the abolition of mandatory retirement ages and wage-peak schemes, mandatory pay disclosure by all employers under gender pay gap reporting rules, the collection of data disaggregated by age and gender, revision of the pension system, and gender impact assessments of government-funded employment services — all as measures to address sexism and ageism simultaneously.


20ki@heraldcorp.com