”Dad's parental leave” in South Korea reaches new record high in first half of the year...One in three people taking parental leave is male

Statistics from South Korea's Ministry of Employment and Labor revealed that one in three workers who took childcare leave in the first half of this year was male, marking the highest proportion of men taking childcare leave on record.
According to employment administration statistics from the Ministry of Employment and Labor on the 4th, the total number of people who received childcare leave benefits for the first time from January to June this year was 69,631. This is 3.
The number of women increased by 2%. This figure does not include public servants or teachers on childcare leave who are enrolled in employment insurance. By gender, there were 47,171 women, a decrease of 1.8% from last year.
The number of men among those receiving benefits for the first time in the first half of the year increased from 28.0% last year to 32.3% in the first half of this year, the highest figure ever.
This means that one in three people taking childcare leave this year is male. In large companies with more than 1,000 employees, the proportion of men among those taking childcare leave in the first half of the year was 43.5%, nearly half.
On the other hand, in businesses with fewer than 100 employees, the figure was only 22.7%, showing a large disparity depending on the size of the company.
Last year, the government introduced a childcare leave allowance scheme under which both parents taking childcare leave to care for a child under 12 months of age receive 100% of their regular wages for the first three months of the year.
The "3+3 Parent Childcare Leave System" was implemented. This year, it has been expanded to "6+6" and the applicable children have been expanded to those up to 18 months old. The upper limit is 2 million won for the first month and 500,000 won per month.
In the sixth month, each parent will receive 4.5 million won. This means that parents who earn more than 4.5 million won (about 485,000 yen) a month can receive 4.5 million won for six months.
In fact, the number of first-time recipients of the 3+3 parental leave system in the first half of last year was 13,160, but in the first half of this year, the number was 6,000.
+6 The number of first-time recipients of parental leave more than doubled to 27,806. The South Korean government has increased the upper limit of childcare leave benefits for the first three months from 1.5 million won (about 160,000 yen) to 2.5 million won.
The government is also considering a bill to raise the upper limit of childcare leave benefits to 20,000 yen (approximately 269,000 yen) and increase the number of childcare leave installments from two to three. However, it is still unclear how the government will secure the funds for the cap on childcare leave benefits.
For this reason, some are of the opinion that an increase in employment insurance premiums is inevitable.