Women make up more than a third of first police cadet class under gender-integrated exam

Women accounted for 37.8 percent of the latest class of police cadets in Korea's first gender-integrated recruitment process, the National Police Agency said Monday, nearly double the roughly 20 percent who typically passed under a quota system.

The exam did away with the long-standing practice of setting fixed hiring targets for each sex and placed all applicants in a single pool. The result was a class of recruits whose gender breakdown closely tracked that of the people who sat for the test.

The agency released the list of 2,941 successful candidates Friday, from the first of two open recruitment rounds planned this year. Of those, 1,829, or 62.2 percent, were men and 1,112, or 37.8 percent, were women. The applicant pool of 29,972 was 62.9 percent male and 37.1 percent female.

The integrated format was years in the making. The police reform committee recommended ending segregated hiring in 2017, the agency's Gender Equality Committee called for full integration in 2020, and the National Police Commission approved the change in 2021. This year's exam was the first to apply the new format across the board.

"The ratio of successful male and female candidates came out at 62.2 to 37.8 percent, nearly the same as the applicant ratio," acting Commissioner General Yoo Jae-seong said at a news briefing Monday. "Until now, because the number of women selected was capped, competition among female applicants tended to be tougher."

On the new circuit-based physical fitness test, 63.9 percent of all candidates passed. The rate was 88.6 percent for men and 42.5 percent for women.

Yoo also addressed concerns that a larger share of female officers could weaken front-line response. "If those concerns become reality or we judge there is a serious problem, we will review institutional measures to address it," he said.

Yoo cautioned that women still account for a small share of the force overall.

"In this recruitment, the proportion of successful female candidates is 37.8 percent, but the proportion of female officers among all police is 16.7 percent," he said. "We will keep analyzing and reviewing this so there is nothing for the public to worry about."

The agency fell short of its hiring target. Of 3,202 planned positions, 261 went unfilled, for a fill rate of 91.8 percent. With different quotas assigned to different regions, Seoul accounted for 100 of the empty slots, followed by southern Gyeonggi with 86, South Jeolla with 30, Ulsan with 19, Incheon with 10, Busan with nine and Jeju with seven. The agency said it may recruit for the vacancies in a second round scheduled for the second half of the year.

BY CHO MUN-GYU [[email protected]]