By Lee Hyo-sik
Staff Reporter
Foreign correspondents put the Ministry of Strategy and Finance in hot water during a press conference Monday in which Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun was asked "humiliating" questions about late-night entertainment culture in Korea.
Evan Ramstad of The Wall Street Journal asked Yoon whether it was difficult for Korean women to be hired as executives of major business groups because male executives enjoy room salons and would not be able to visit them if their colleagues were women.
Room salons are drinking establishments where men partner with hostesses who serve drinks and sometimes perform "other" services.
In response, Yoon said many women here these days participate in business activities, adding more than half of new prosecutors and judges were women.
"With growing female economic participation, women do not have as many babies as they used to in the past, slashing the nation's birthrates. Room salons have nothing to do with Korean women's economic activities."
Ramstad then asked whether finance ministry officials were treated to lavish entertainment at room salons by businessmen. Yoon asked where the reporter obtained such information, flatly denying it and emphasizing that the behavior of public officials was strictly regulated by an ethical code.
CBS Radio reporter Don Kirk then said executives and employees of Korea's large businesses group were the main customers of room salons, insisting the government should bar companies from deducting such expenses from their taxable income.
Minister Yoon responded that there was an upper limit on how much entertainment-related expenditure businesses can deduct from taxable income, adding that beyond the legally allowed limit, there were no tax incentives.
Senior ministry officials, who declined to be named, said the reporters asked the minister "silly" questions on purpose to humiliate him in public.
Ramstad rejected this accusation, telling The Korea Times that he asked the top government economic policymaker about employment conditions for women because Monday was International Women's Day. "Statistics show that Korea has the lowest female employment and widest pay gap between genders among OECD countries," he said.
He asked Yoon about whether he thought the male-only room salon culture was a factor in the low female economic population.
The incident shows how rocky the relations between Korean policymakers and foreign media outlets are.
Since the onset of the global financial crisis, government officials have claimed that foreign media have written negative reports about Korea because they lack understanding, a charge that correspondents for the latter, most of whom are Korean, have rejected.
leehs@koreatimes.co.kr