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| Sejong City Hall / Korea Times file |
By Lee Hae-rin
More local governments are requiring both female and male civil servants to work the night shift in response to growing complaints of women getting exempted from night duties.
According to Sejong City, Wednesday, it has decided to revise its night duty regulations to allow female employees to work the night shift starting later this month, joining other city governments such as Seoul, Incheon, Daegu and Busan that have already made the move.
The city government of Sejong, an administrative center housing government ministries and agencies, had allowed female employees to work only the day shift from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Meanwhile, only men could be assigned to work a 15-hour overnight shift from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. the next morning.
The measure came amid the growing number of female employees in its workforce ― the percentage of female city officials has grown steadily from 45.1 percent in 2020 to 48.8 percent as of March this year.
In the city government's survey conducted last November of the entire workforce of 636 officials, an overwhelming majority of 70 percent agreed to take the gender-integration measure.
Those who are pregnant or gave birth within the previous 12 months will be excluded from night shifts.
The Jeju Special Self-Governing Province also decided to include female employees on night shifts starting this month, the provincial government said, Monday.
Similar to Sejong, the island government has been seeing a growing rate of women in its civil servant workforce from 32.4 percent in 2020 to 36.8 percent as of this January. Most of its employees ― 69.6 percent of 319 respondents ― agreed on a gender-inclusion policy put forward in provincial government survey in February.
The city governments of Jeju City and Seogwipo also introduced gender-integration measures in January and April, respectively.
Women had been excluded from nighttime duties due to concerns about their safety, but this measure comes amid growing complaints from men that excluding female employees from night-shift duty constitutes discrimination against male staff.
According to the latest analysis of the Korean Women's Development Institute's (KWDI) online discourse on work culture, "reverse discrimination against men" topped the complaints categorized under gender discrimination.
The report, published on Dec. 29, 2022, by the KWDI's center for gender-sensitive data, analyzed 2,572 posts uploaded on Blind, an anonymous online community for office workers. Most of the complaints were about excluding women from nighttime duties, the report said.
Kim Eun-jung, the KWDI researcher who authored the report, told The Korea Times, Monday, that the analysis "reflects the growing gender divide in Korea."
However, she also underscored that the gender and socio-political inclination of the users could be associated with the conclusion, considering the anonymous nature of the platform.
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