Evidence of a glass ceiling for arts and culture professionals in Korea

ABSTRACT

Using the five available waves of the Wage Structure Survey data, this study employs quantile decomposition to investigate the existence of a glass ceiling among Korean professionals. The decomposition results for all professional workers show an inverse U-shape, which implies no evidence of a glass ceiling. However, we find a monotonically increasing pattern for arts and culture professionals, indicating strong evidence of a glass ceiling on their labour market. This result implies that, as the wage quantile moves from lower to higher levels, female professionals in arts and culture jobs face significant barriers to career advancement. This analysis supports the recent assertion of UNESCO that gender equality in culture is not immune to inequalities and discrimination.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender wage gaps
• glass ceiling
• wage distribution
• professional jobs

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J16
• J31
• J44
• J71

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ We can also consider the gender wage gap widens towards the bottom of the wage distribution, as a sticky floor. According to previous research, the sticky floor phenomenon rarely occurred in the Korean labour market and, thus, we focus only on the existence of a glass ceiling.

² See Bielby and Bielby (1996), Cowen (1996), Gilberg and Hines (2000), Bielby (2009), Treme and Craig (2013), Lindemann, Rush, and Tepper (2016) for related studies on gender inequalities and discrimination in the arts and culture sector.

³ For all professionals, we find limited evidence of a glass ceiling at the top 90th percentile. However, if the glass ceiling exists when the 90th percentile wage gap is higher than the reference wage gap (e.g. 50th or 75th percentile) by at least two percentage points (Arulampalam, Booth, and Bryan 2007), there is no evidence of a glass ceiling for all professionals.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-20170773].