The Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) has launched an initiative to upgrade its existing gender equality assessment system to more systematically manage gender equality levels within the organization. The move aims to move beyond the previous approach, which focused merely on identifying the status quo, and to build a system that calculates and manages gender equality levels by linking policy outcomes with overall organizational operations.
According to reporting by The Seoul Economic Daily on Tuesday, the KNPA recently commissioned a research service titled "Research on Restructuring the KNPA's Gender Equality Indicator System and Designing Targets." The core of the research is to reorganize existing internal gender equality indicators and to design mid- to long-term targets and a management model together. In particular, a new method will be introduced in which weights are assigned to each indicator to quantify the gender equality level of each agency.
Since 2019, the KNPA has operated gender equality indicators centered on four areas: expanding female representation, preventing sexual crimes within the organization, work-life balance, and strengthening the gender equality policy framework. The approach combines objective indicators, such as the proportion of female police officers, the rate of parental leave use, and participation in sexual harassment prevention training, with subjective indicators that ask about members' perceptions of gender equality.
However, critics have pointed out that the existing indicators only identify organizational conditions and have limitations in leading to actual policy improvements. The recent recurrence of sexual misconduct cases and organizational culture controversies within the police is also interpreted as having heightened the awareness that actual policy effectiveness, rather than simple statistical management, needs to be measured. "Until now, the focus has been on measuring the gap between reality and individual perceptions," a KNPA official said. "We plan to strengthen the function of the indicator system by linking it with mid- to long-term gender equality policies so that it can be used as an objective basis for diagnosing and adjusting policies."
The KNPA also plans to set separate gender equality targets by agency and function based on the revised indicators. The plan is to calculate gender equality levels not only for the KNPA as a whole but also for each provincial police agency, then establish mid- to long-term targets for 2027-2029 along with annual implementation roadmaps. In this process, the agency plans to design a new assessment system that reflects recent environmental changes, such as advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology and shifts in organizational culture.
The KNPA also plans to develop an automated management model that allows each agency to independently measure and diagnose its gender equality level and to predict future levels based on target achievement. Through this, the KNPA intends to establish a system that can continuously manage and evaluate the performance of gender equality policies. "If a system that quantifies and manages gender equality levels by agency takes root, there could be considerable changes in the way the organization operates," a police official said.
