The Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) has begun upgrading its gender equality evaluation system to more precisely manage the level of gender equality within the organization. Moving beyond existing indicators that merely assessed the current situation, the agency plans to build a system that quantitatively scores and manages gender equality levels by linking them to policy outcomes and organizational operations.
According to reporting by The Seoul Economic Daily on Tuesday, the KNPA recently commissioned a research project titled "Reorganization of the KNPA Gender Equality Indicator System and Goal Design." The core of the project is to restructure existing gender equality indicators within the organization and to design mid-to-long-term goals and a management model. In particular, a new method will be introduced that sets weights for each indicator to quantitatively calculate gender equality levels.
Since 2019, the KNPA has operated gender equality indicators centered on four main areas: expanding female representation, eradicating sexual offenses within the organization, work-life balance, and expanding the gender equality policy implementation system. The method combines objective indicators such as the proportion of female police officers, parental leave usage rates, and participation rates in sexual harassment prevention training, along with subjective indicators that assess the level of gender equality awareness within the organization.
However, critics have pointed out that the existing indicators have been limited to diagnosing the current situation and have fallen short of leading to actual policy improvements. The recurrence of sexual misconduct cases and controversies over organizational culture within the police organization appears to have also influenced the need to measure the effectiveness of gender equality policies in substantive terms, beyond simple statistical management. "Previously, the focus was on measuring the gap between reality and individual perception," a KNPA official said. "We will expand the function of the indicator system so that it can be linked to mid-to-long-term gender equality policies and used as an objective basis for policy diagnosis and adjustment."
Based on the revised indicators, the KNPA also plans to set gender equality goals for each agency and function. The plan is to calculate gender equality levels not only for the KNPA as a whole but also for each regional police agency, then prepare mid-to-long-term goals for 2027-2029 along with annual roadmaps. In this process, the agency intends to build a new evaluation system that reflects the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and changes in organizational culture.
The agency also plans to develop an automated management model that allows each agency to measure and diagnose its gender equality level on its own and predict future levels based on goal achievement. Through this, the KNPA aims to establish a system that can continuously manage and evaluate the performance of gender equality policies going forward. "Beyond improving organizational culture, quantifying and managing gender equality levels by agency could bring significant changes to agency evaluations and organizational operations," a police official said.
