Gender, engineering, and innovation in South Korea: an empirical investigation of the industrial patriarchy of the Southeastern region

Abstract

This study examines the role of gender in the industrial development and innovation of South Korea’s Southeastern heavy manufacturing clusters through the concept of ‘industrial patriarchy.’ The term denotes institutional practices and norms historically rooted in the 1970s and 1980s that reinforced gendered patterns of education and employment in the region’s industrial cities. The study examines gender marginalisation in regional innovation policies and workforce segregation, utilising text mining, policy document analysis and regression analyses. The results show that women are systematically excluded from engineering employment and from policy discourses on regional innovation, which, in turn, sustains gender segregation in education and work. At the same time, firm-level regression analyses indicate that women’s share of the workforce has a positive effect on innovation. Thus, the persistent under-representation of women in the heavy industrial sectors of the Southeastern region has negative consequences for regional innovation performance. By highlighting how gender, engineering and territorial context interact, these findings provide anuanced understanding of the structural barriers shaping industrial transformation and contribute new evidence to debates on the gendered dynamics of innovation in East Asian manufacturing regimes.