Hello, I'm a Korean student who studies working mothers. In my paper, I'll deal with present situation for working mothers in Korea compared with other countries where women's rights are almost equal to men's. So, I need some information of the percentage of working mothers, government policies for women and children, child care (for example, baby sitter xx%, nursery xx% like that) families satisfactions and so on. So, please let me know where I can get information as soon as possible. Thank you so much.

Before I attempt to answer your question, I want to clarify that as in Korea, in the majority of countries, women aren't equal to men. In fact, though the Scandanavian countries are close, I can't think of one country where women and men are currently equal. This inequality is especially true for working mothers. The term alone hints at the inequality--have you ever heard of working fathers? The responsibility of child rearing falls mostly on mothers.

The specific statistics that I do have on working mothers is only for the U.S.--and it is pretty outdated. For instance, in 1992, 76.3% of mothers were employed full-time in the workforce. (*This information comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, so you should contact them for more information.) As for the childcare question--In 1988, 36.8% of all children in child-care were cared for in another person's home; 16.6% were cared for in a day care center; 9.2 % in a preschool/nursery school, in 1992, 76.3% of mothers were employed full-time in the workforce. (*This information comes from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, so you should contact them for more information.) As for satisfaction, I don't have any sense of that.

I hope this helps with your report and I just want to emphasize that countries continue to undervalue child and women--1.) by not implementing national systems of child care; 2.) by not providing for a work environment that works for working parents; and 3.) by only talking about "working mothers." I hope you'll address that.

—Amy