South Korea's Public-Sector Gender Employment Disclosure System

Since 2021, South Korea's Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (MOGEF) has compiled and published annual gender wage-gap statistics for public institutions — 344 organisations in the 2024 round — under its Gender Employment Disclosure System, alongside a parallel disclosure covering roughly 2,980 large and listed private companies.
Each public institution's average pay by gender and its tenure gap are aggregated and released publicly by MOGEF, creating year-on-year accountability pressure inside the public sector. The government has cited this public-sector track record as the evidence base for a mandatory private-sector wage-disclosure system now being phased in for 2026.
The measured gender pay gap in public institutions fell every year on record: 26.3% (2021), 25.2% (2022), 22.7% (2023) and 20.0% (2024) — men averaging 72.7 million won against 58.2 million won for women in 2024 — while the tenure gap fell from 29% to 19.9% over the same period. Over the same four years, the comparable private-sector gap moved the other way, widening to 30.7% in 2024, a contrast MOGEF and Korean media have pointed to as evidence linking sustained public disclosure to faster gap-closing.
The public-sector improvement is a correlational trend, not a controlled evaluation, and may partly reflect broader public-sector hiring and promotion policies rather than disclosure alone. Because mandatory private-sector disclosure is still being phased in for 2026, it remains untested whether the same trend will hold once private employers face equivalent transparency requirements.

Read the full analysis: https://www.korea.kr/briefing/pressReleaseView.do?newsId=156716894