South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea, is a high-income country in East Asia with a population of 51 million. Saddled with patriarchal Confucian traditions, South Korea continues to perform poorly on gender equality issues despite recent state and civil society advocacy. Paid domestic work in South Korea is a highly feminized, stigmatized, and irregular profession that comprises two main groups of workers: older local female workers, and stigmatized co-ethnic diasporic Korean migrant workers of foreign citizenship (mostly Chinese citizens) who are referred to as joseonjok. Despite its poor performance in gender equality measures, South Korea scored well for Sub-index A of the Global Care Policy Index with a score of 7.51 out of 10. This is driven by the country’s relatively strong regulatory frameworks for family caregivers, though the enforcement of these protections is sometimes lacking. South Korea’s comprehensive pregnancy and maternity leave protections, dependent care leave, and flexible work arrangement provisions contributed to its high Sub-Index A score, while its inadequate and underdeveloped employment protections for domestic workers resulted in a poorer performance of 6.34 out of 10 in Sub-Index B. Overall, South Korea scored 6.92 out of 10 for the GCPI as a whole.
Despite attempts to bring the plight of domestic care providers to the attention of policymakers, there continues to be inadequate regulatory protections for unpaid family caregivers and paid domestic workers. This article introduces the Global Care Policy Index (GCPI), an original scoring system for care-policy comparisons. The GCPI aims to achieve two objectives: first, to systematically assess how states' domestic-care provider protections match up to International Labour Organization policy benchmarks, and second, to incentivise states to improve their policy protections for care providers in the domestic sphere by harnessing their competitive instincts to improve their GCPI score. This article outlines the design and methodology behind the index's construction and reports the findings from the pilot phase of the project where 29 countries' care-provider policy protections were scored. The pilot highlighted key gaps in policy protections for both unpaid family caregivers and paid domestic workers and outlined areas where carework scholars and activists can focus their efforts. In this manner, the GCPI offers a quantitative assessment of a country's care-provider protections, allowing for fast and direct care-policy comparisons between countries in the same region or with the same developmental status.
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