South Korea’s Police Overhaul Gender Equity Metrics to Combat Misconduct

South Korea’s National Police Agency (NPA) has moved to overhaul its gender-equality assessment framework so it can manage gender equity within the force more systematically. Rather than merely tracking the current situation, the agency aims to build a system that links policy outcomes with overall organizational operations to quantify and manage levels of gender equality.

Seoul Economic Daily reported on May 6 that the police recently commissioned a study titled “Revision of the National Police Agency Gender-Equality Indicator System and Target Design.” The study will reorganize existing internal indicators and design medium- to long-term targets and a management model. One new element will assign weights to individual indicators so agencies’ gender-equity levels can be quantified.

Since 2019, the NPA has tracked gender-equality indicators across four areas: expanding female representation, preventing sexual offenses within the force, promoting work–life balance, and strengthening the governance that advances gender-equality policies. The system combines objective measures—share of female officers, parental leave utilization, and participation rates in sexual-harassment prevention training—with subjective measures that survey personnel perceptions of gender equality.

Critics argue the previous indicators largely described organizational conditions and fell short of driving policy improvements. Recent, repeated incidents of sexual misconduct and controversies over police culture have increased calls for measures that assess actual policy effects rather than simply compiling statistics. A police official said, “Until now, we focused on measuring the gap between reality and individual perceptions. We plan to strengthen the indicator system and link it to medium- and long-term gender-equality policies so it can serve as an objective basis for policy diagnosis and adjustment.”

Using the revised indicators, the NPA will set separate gender-equality targets by agency and by function. It will calculate gender-equity scores for the entire force and for each provincial police agency, then prepare medium-term targets for 2027–2029 and an annual implementation roadmap. The agency plans to incorporate recent environmental changes—such as advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and shifts in organizational culture—into the new evaluation framework.

The NPA also plans to develop an automated management model that allows each agency to measure and diagnose its gender-equity level internally and to forecast future levels based on target attainment. Officials say this will establish a system for continuous management and evaluation of the outcomes of gender-equality policies. “If we institutionalize a system that quantifies and manages agency-level gender equality, it could lead to significant changes in how we operate,” a police official said.