Women’s Representation Gaps in Korean Municipalities: Workforce Presence, Managerial Authority, and Appointed Committee Participation

Women’s representation in government is often assessed with a single indicator, obscuring where representational gaps emerge. This article examines women’s representation in Korean municipalities across three institutional sites: workforce presence, managerial authority, and appointed committee participation. Using a balanced 2018 to 2024 panel of 226 municipalities, it compares women’s representation across these locations and evaluates how closely they align within the same local governments. The analysis shows that women’s representation increased across all three sites, but unevenly. The most persistent shortfall appears between workforce presence and managerial authority: municipalities with larger female workforce shares also tend to have larger female managerial shares, but managerial parity remains rare. Appointed committee participation occupies a different position. It is generally more gender-balanced than managerial hierarchy, yet it appears more closely tied to monitored gender-balance benchmarks than to the gender composition of the municipal workforce. Fiscal self-reliance is examined as a contextual municipal characteristic, and it does not account for the main authority gap once basic municipal characteristics are introduced. The findings show that single-indicator accounts can overstate women’s organizational inclusion and that managerial authority remains the main site of representational slippage in local government.