[LINK] "Korea Shows the Way on 'Womenomics'"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's William Pesek suggests that South Korea is doing a better job incorporating women into public life than Japan, and that it shows economically.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says he wants to put more women to work, to help make up for the country's shrinking population. His Liberal Democratic Party seems to have other ideas. Of the 1,093 people who ran for office in recent snap elections, a mere 169 were women. Once the votes were counted, the lower house was 91 percent male.

That ratio falls a long way short of Abe's goal for corporate Japan: to have women in 30 percent of leadership roles in all sectors by 2020. Such ambitious targets are laudable. Studies routinely show diversity at companies and in politics increases innovation and economic growth. The problem is that thus far, Abe's policies have been too incremental and unimaginative to have much impact.

The prime minister might want to study neighboring South Korea, where President Park Geun Hye looks to be pioneering a smarter path. In her latest budget, Park has earmarked much of next year's 5.5 percent increase in public expenditures to encourage companies to offer more flexible schedules -- key for working mothers -- and to subsidize the prohibitive cost of childcare. For kids aged three to five, day care will now be free.

Park has set some ambitious goals of her own, including raising the number of women in the work force to 62 percent by 2017, from the current 56 percent. While she could go further -- say, by setting quotas for female managers -- Moody's, for one, is impressed. The ratings agency has described Park's pro-women policies as "credit positive."

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The private sector amply demonstrates the power of diversity, Bloomberg data show. Crunching the numbers, my Seoul-based colleague Esther Jang finds that the 24 Kospi 200 companies with at least one female board member outperform others in Korea by 22 percent. In Japan, the 180 companies in the Topix index that have a female board member (out of nearly 1,800) outperform by 33 percent. At Jack Ma's Alibaba, one third of 18 founding partners are women, as are nine of the company's 30 top decision makers. The company, a finalist for this year's Financial Times women-in-business award, recently pulled off history's biggest initial public offering.