Word: seoul
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...South Korea couldn't use the help. Though South Korea is Asia's fourth largest economy, only about half of its women have full-time jobs; in June, nearly 10 million women were employed nationwide, according to the National Statistics Office, compared to almost 14 million men. In Seoul, many women work infamously long hours, with employers offering few systems to help working mothers keep a manageable balance between their jobs and families. "Because of the very high price of child-rearing in Korea, it may prove more economical to stay behind helping children to do better in the school...
...nice idea, but the plan may end up reasserting South Korean women's secondary status more than boosting it. Led by Mayor Oh Se Hoon, the $104 million program launched in 2007 under the slogan "Happy Women, Happy Seoul," with a focus on mothers of young children and the unemployed. Assistant mayor of women and family policy affairs Cho Eun Hee says the program will be, among other things, helping to find work for jobless women, paving streets to make them high-heel friendly, building more women's public restrooms, improving lighting in public spaces, creating safe parks for women...
...Seoul's women should officially be happy - at least the ones with driver's licenses. In May, the city government started to paint 4,929 public and private parking places pink throughout the city, with thousands more slated to go under the brush next year. The pink parking spots, reserved for women drivers so they don't have to walk so far to work or the mall, are part of the South Korean capital's Women Friendly Seoul Project, an effort for the notoriously macho Asian city of more than 10 million to transform itself into a safer, more heel...
...While Seoul's project may help women "worry less about harassment or violence," Chang says, "the question remains about how to share the household chores and responsibilities" so that women can more freely enter - and stay - in the labor market. Eunyoung Cho, a 25-year-old who will be leaving Seoul this fall to pursue a degree in economics at the University of California, Davis, also questions its efficacy, saying the project seems more political than personal. "The policies make the citizens feel that their mayor is doing something, but they do not feel the changes in their lives...
...Indeed, the former President's trip to Pyongyang evokes the never-ending back-to-the-future quality of dealing with North Korea. "They've repeated the same pattern over the past two decades," says Yun Duk-min of the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul, a Foreign Ministry think tank. Ratchet up the nuclear tensions, declare diplomacy dead, and then hope to win even bigger concessions as talks reconvene later. But since taking office, Obama has proved no slouch at playing the game from the other side. In the wake of the nuclear test this past spring...