Jung Sung-im - Civilian in Military

From Business Ghana:

South Korea's military academy has appointed a female civilian as a professor for the first time in its history, an academy official said Saturday.

The development comes as the male-dominated military is seeking to give more opportunities to women.

Jung Sung-im, a former research fellow of Ewha Womans University,became the first woman and civilian professor to have a full-time teaching position at the Korea Military Academy, the official said.

Jung said she had taught cadets at the academy as a lecturer for the past nine years before being named a full-time professor on Friday.

Jung will teach politics and national security as a civilian worker in the military, beginning in the second semester, the official said.

So far, only army officers have taught cadets as full-time employees at the academy.

In a related development, all female college students are eligible to join the military's Reserve Officers' Training Corps program, beginning this year.

There are some 6,400 female commissioned officers and non-commissioned officers in the country's 655,000-strong military. Women are not required to complete military service.

Sth Korean "Comfort Women" Slam Apology

From Radio Australia:

There have been angry protests in the South Korean capital Seoul after the Japanese prime minister's apology for his country's often brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula a century ago.

The apology has been met with mixed responses in Seoul, where South Korean politicians reportedly 'noted' the apology but said it failed to go far enough. Hundreds of South Korean women enslaved by the Japanese as so-called comfort women during the occupation have also held noisy protests outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul denouncing the apology.

South Korea: Women Put Marriage On Hold

From Bernama:

A growing number of South Korean women in their late twenties, considered as the ideal age for marriage, are reluctant to tie the knot, said China's Xinhua news agency citing a report by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHSA) revealed on Wednesday.

The unmarried rate among women aged between 25 and 29 surged to 59.1 percent in 2005 from 11.8 percent in 1975, the report said.

With the drastic growth in the number of single women in their late twenties, two out of three women hit their thirties without a spouse, it said.

Changed attitudes toward marriage are also apparent even among married women. Only 14 percent of married women saw marriage as necessary, according to the report.

The report said that 59.4 percent of singles, including both men and women, said they are not getting married because of value-related reasons, such as self-development and the pursuit of further education. Economic problems, with 31.9 percent, are the second most common reason for remaining unmarried.

South Korea in recent years has been grappling with the low birth rate. "Marriage-friendly policies along with reducing the age for first marriage should be devised," Byun Yong-chan, researcher at the KIHSA was quoted by local media as saying.

Korea: The Female Factor

From the New York Times:

So many women have entered public service in recent years that, in 2003, the government revised its quota system. In 1996 it had begun mandating that at least 30 percent of new hires in all government departments except the police and military be women. Now, because so many women have succeeded in competing for these jobs, it is applying the minimum 30 percent quota for men as well.

The recent surge of women in the public sector is an outcome of government efforts to expand democracy after decades of military rule, to combat economic stagnation by bringing more well-educated women into the paid work force and to check the country’s plummeting birthrate, attributed in part to the difficulties South Korean women face trying to combine careers and motherhood.

Faced with all this, it has been the government that has led the way to expand women’s rights. Since the mid-1990s, it has enacted laws addressing issues like sexual and domestic violence.

Sth Korea: Fake Proposals

From the Herald Sun:

A COURT in South Korea has revoked a law that punished men for conning women into bed - by falsely promising to marry them.

South Korea's Constitutional Court on Thursday put an end to penal code 304 under which offenders who deceived women "with no penchant for debauchery" could be punished with up to two years in jail.

The law placed unnecessary restrictions on individual rights and ignored women's rights to make their own decisions concerning their sex lives, the court said.

It also pointed out that the old law forced "traditional, male-chauvinistic morals" upon women by protecting only those the law deemed had "no penchant for debauchery".

"Those who have been punished in the past under the old law can now ask for re-examination of their cases so that their criminal records may be wiped out," court spokesman Noh Hee-Bum said.

Female blackmailers had also used the 56-year-old law to extort money from men, Noh said, by threatening to sue after sex, claiming they'd only gone to bed with the men after they'd been proposed to.