South Korean women shatter glass ceiling

Earlier this year, three long-time Samsung employees were promoted to executive positions.

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They were among the first women hired after Samsung stopped gender discriminatory hiring practices in 1992, reports B.J. Lee for the Daily Beast.

Now 56,000 women work at Samsung, which is still only a quarter of the total workforce. And only 2% of Samsung’s executives are women, well behind Hewlett-Packard with 18% and a woman CEO.

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Only 49% of married women in Korea work outside the home.

“It is a huge waste not to use highly educated women in Korea,” Kim Tae-hong, of the Korean Women’s Development Institute told Daily Beast. “Korea’s economic growth potentials are greatly undermined by the lack of sufficient female workers, particularly corporate executives.”

Read: Women are now breadwinners