Promoting women will boost economic potential of U.S., S.Korea
Boosting women’s participation in the workforce and giving them more leadership opportunities would boost the economic potential of South Korea and the United States, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told a group of women entrepreneurs in Seoul.
Women represented a “huge untapped resource” for both the United States and South Korea, Yellen, the first woman to head the U.S. Treasury, told the women in remarks prepared for delivery during a lunch at a vegan restaurant in Seoul.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that closing the gender gap in labour force participation could boost South Korea’s real gross domestic product by 2035 by more than 7%. “Women should be given the ability to stay in the workforce,” Yellen said, adding that many Korean women faced pressure to stay home and raise families. Women everywhere were also held back from rising to senior jobs in public service and the private sector – even in advanced economies such as the United States.
A Treasury official said the conversation focused on the challenges of moving ahead in the tech sector while balancing careers and families, a theme echoed during a subsequent meeting Yellen held with women economists from the Bank of Korea.
Jenna Lee, founder and chief executive of AIM, South Korea’s first robo adviser, welcomed the chance to meet Yellen.
“The challenges women face are much more pronounced in the finance and tech sector,” she told Reuters. “We are fully aware of the fact that we are setting an example for the next generation to come.”
In her meeting with Bank of Korea economists, Yellen shared her own experiences in the male-dominated profession of economics, and said she was ultimately able to juggle both a family and career because she married a man who “strongly believed in a fair division of labor in our household”.
She said she had worked for years to expand the relatively low number of women who studied economics in the United States and pushed to increase the “disappointingly low” number of women in senior roles at the Federal Reserve when she was there.
The economists presented Yellen with a plaque that said her legacy had inspired them to “learn more, do more, and become more”.
