Compared with other industrialized countries, highly educated women are poorly represented in the paid work force in South Korea, where Confucian-influenced tradition continues to give married women overriding responsibility for managing the household and raising children.

In 2007, only 60.9 percent of women with college or graduate degrees were employed, the lowest rate among the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (The O.E.C.D. average was 79.9 percent.)

Women who do work outside the home tend to be clustered in low-level service and manufacturing jobs — a fact that had consequences in the recent recession. In the United States and Europe, more men than women lost their jobs. But in South Korea, a whopping 90 percent of those made jobless were women, partly because they made up so many of the part-time and contract workers who have proved easy targets when it comes to cutting costs.

In January, just over 45 percent of working-age women were employed, compared with almost 70 percent of men. Women bring in only 52 percent of what men get in wages, according to the U.N. Development Program’s gender empowerment measure, which last year ranked South Korea 62nd out of 109 countries in terms of income and of political and economic participation and decision-making.

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.

It has also revised more than 300 existing laws to eliminate gender bias since 2005, the year the Constitutional Court threw out provisions in the Civil Code that said that only men could be the legal head of household and that children must take their father’s surname, thus toppling centuries-old tenets of Korean society. Women’s rights advocates still mention this ruling as one of their greatest coups.

“Our strategy has been to change the laws and institutions first so the rest of the society can catch up in changing attitudes and culture in favor of gender equality,” said Chung Bong-hyup, director general at the Ministry of Gender Equality, which was established in 2001.