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A new paper by University of Kansas professor ChangHwan Kim and Portland State fellow Byeongdon Oh seeks to quantify the precise impact of misogyny on South Korean women’s income, after controlling for all other variables. The conclusion: between one-quarter and one-third.
The new study by Kim and Oh sought to isolate the effects of misogyny by excluding the commonly claimed reason for discrimination against women in the job market: that employers avoid hiring women because they expect women will quit after having children.
Kim and Oh did so by a clever use of a proxy: they quantified “pure” misogyny level per locality by how far their gender ratio for people born in 1990 deviated from the natural ratio of 105 men to 100 women. South Korea in 1990 was when sex-selective abortion was common, such that the overall gender ratio for newborns in 1990 was approximately 110 boys to 100 girls.
By using the gender ratio as a proxy for the severity of misogyny, Kim and Oh found that the regions that had greater levels of misogyny also had greater income gaps between the two sexes - and that gap was between one-quarter and one-third.
