Had the affirmative action in South Korea improved women representation in management?

Abstract

This research aims to empirically evaluate whether the affirmative action in Korea has contributed to improving women representation in management at a workplace-level, utilizing the data collected from Workplace Panel Survey (WPS) from 2005 to 2015 by every other year. To verify the causality, this study basically follows the same logic as a difference-in-differences model, exploiting the fact that only workplaces of which total number of workers exceeds the policy criterion are subject to the affirmative action. In addition, this study takes into account and addresses two critical issues, which may lead to endogeneity problems, stemming from the way the policy was introduced and intrinsic features of workplaces: (a) variation in treatment timing between the two treated groups and (b) variation in total number of workers over time at some workplaces. The empirical results were mixed and not robust to the analysis methods, measures of employment of female managers, suggesting the affirmative action had been ineffective in expanding employment of female managers.