All-male presidential lineup vie for top office amid chronic underrepresentation of women in politics
Half of South Korea's voters are women, but on the ballot to elect a new president, all the candidates are men for the first time in nearly two decades.
The absence of female contenders marks the first all-male ballot since the 2007 election, when all 12 candidates were men, according to the official website of the National Election Commission’s Cyber Election History Museum.
Female representation peaked in the 2012 election, when former President Park Geun-hye — then the leader of Saenuri Party, the precursor of today's People Power Party — was elected the nation’s first female leader.
Of the seven registered candidates that year, four were women, including Park, Lee Jung-hee of the Unified Progressive Party and independent contenders Kim So-yeon and Kim Soon-ja.
However, female participation in presidential elections has waned since former President Park's removal from office via impeachment in March 2017 amid a high-profile corruption case.
Sim Sang-jung, former head of the progressive Justice Party, was the sole female candidate in the subsequent snap election held in May that year, which saw 15 contenders vying for the top office.
Only two women ran in the 2022 election, which had 14 candidates. They included Sim, the first female politician in the nation's history to run in two consecutive presidential elections, and Kim Jae-yeon of the Progressive Party.
As the June 3 presidential election draws near with no female candidates, a growing number of women have voiced disappointment online.
“It feels like democracy is going backward. I doubt we’ll see any meaningful policies for women,” one woman wrote on her Naver blog.
Over in the legislative branch, women hold 61 out of 300 seats in the unicameral National Assembly, representing just 20.3 percent of the total. The figure falls well below the OECD average of 34.1 percent, placing Korea 35th among the 38 member countries.
Who was the first woman to run for president?
Hong Sook-ja, 91, a former diplomat, was the first woman to register as a presidential candidate in South Korea.
Hong ran as a candidate for the Social Democratic Party in late 1987, which featured major political figures such as future Presidents Kim Dae-jung, Roh Tae-woo and Kim Young-sam.
She campaigned with the slogan, “A political miracle will come from a woman president,” but dropped out of the race on Dec. 5, just days before the election, to support Kim Young-sam. That political miracle, as it turned out, never came, even though the country would go on to elect a female president some 25 years later.
cjh@heraldcorp.com
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