​​To create a true gender-equal society, women’s increased participation in the labor force should be accompanied by improvement in the quality of their work. The reality, however, is that though Korean women’s higher education and employment rates are not much lower than men’s, only a very small number of women are in manager positions or higher in the workplace. This can be seen as the result of the prevailing gender inequality in Korean society.

The Korean Women’s Development Institute is a government-funded research institution under the Office for Government Policy Coordination and Prime Minister’s Secretariat. As an institution established for research and development of policies on women and family, the Korean Women’s Development Institute conducted its first Korean Women Manager Panel Survey in 2007. Over the past 12 years since then, the institute has conducted a panel survey and tracked women managers in private enterprises, their working conditions, and so forth.

The Korean Women Manager Panel Survey is the only panel survey at home and abroad that identifies women managers’ working conditions, organizational culture, networks, career development, leadership, and work-life balance by tracking their entry to the labor market and progress in the company. The second cycle of the KWMP survey began in 2020 with the establishment of a new panel of female and male managers to enable comparative analysis by gender. Through the survey, we will continue to produce data needed to formulate and evaluate policies related to fostering women managers.

This survey is a national statistical survey approved by Statistics Korea (approval No. 154010). Hopefully, the data from this survey will lay the basis for making policies to resolve gender inequality in the labor market and to increase the number of women managers.