ABSTRACT
South Korea is rapidly aging, and women tend to face a higher risk of financial and social vulnerabilities in old age. In this chapter, I first describe older persons’ current stake in Korean society: relatively poor, lonely, and increasingly requiring long-term care services. Then the social expectations that women face– i.e. women as main family caregiver, regardless of their involvement in paid work– are discussed as the root cause of women’s accumulated disadvantages over their lifespan. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the urgent need for a gender paradigm change as a fundamental response to the societal challenge of aging.
