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MJ Song, a South Korean working mother with a four-year-old son, considers herself lucky because she has been able to work for one company for more than 15 years without her career being hindered by starting a family.

Her employer, a unit of Shinhan Financial Group, offers generous pay and benefits such as baby bonuses, childcare allowances and flexible working, allowing her to balance work and family life in a country notorious for long working hours and rigid corporate cultures.

Song took two years of maternity leave after her son was born then worked for four hours a day for a year, receiving half her normal salary. Shinhan also allows women to work two hours fewer a day during pregnancy and employees with children in their first two years of primary school to start work an hour later.

“I am satisfied with my job as the salary is high with a lot of benefits for working moms,” says Song. “The workload is heavy, but my PC gets automatically turned off after 6pm. It has been relatively easy to balance work and family life, while most of my friends have quit their jobs after childbirth.”

Korean financial groups have been one of the most coveted workplaces among female graduates, thanks to their competitive pay and childcare-related perks, despite technology causing wider cuts to the industry’s workforce.

Financial groups are also notable for their relatively high number of female workers in the male-dominated, manufacturing-driven economy. Female workers account for more than half of the financial sector workforce, about double the average in South Korea’s 500 biggest companies by sales, according to research group Leaders Index.

Labour expert Bae Kyu-shik says: “Financial companies have become good employers for women, thanks to their high pay and strong internal welfare benefits.”

Women boast an average 14.5 years of service at Korean banks versus men’s 15.4 years, while women’s annual salaries average Won96.9mn ($66,100), compared with Won128.4mn for men, Leaders Index data shows. Similar to the manufacturing sector, most Korean bank staff retire in their mid-fifties, but they usually receive generous severance pay and packages that amount to several years’ salary if they retire early.

Foreign lenders in Korea, such as Citibank and Standard Chartered, also offer flexible work for parents with young children, reduced hours for pregnant women and longer paternity leave. They also offer baby bonuses, although these are less generous than those from local counterparts.

As the country addresses the world’s lowest fertility rate of 0.75 per cent, Korean banks have been at the forefront of the government-led initiative to solve it by offering various childcare benefits. The demographic crisis poses a huge challenge for sustaining economic growth and providing pensions and healthcare for an ageing population.

But economic and cultural discrimination means many Korean women remain reluctant to marry and have children. South Korea has the highest gender pay gap among rich countries, with women paid almost a third less than men, despite their above-average level of tertiary education, reports the OECD.

There are equal opportunities for hiring, but they are not equal positions

South Korea’s male-oriented corporate culture and working hours — some of the longest in the OECD — remain a barrier to women’s labour participation, with more than 15 per cent of married women quitting jobs after having children, according to government data, while those who keep working struggle to progress in their careers.

The government has been spending heavily to counter the low birth rate, with financial groups going beyond national requirements by offering baby bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars and up to three years of maternity leave, as well as flexible working for parents with children aged below 10 at school. Statutory leave is up to a year and a half.

Banks such as KB Kookmin and Woori last year started offering up to three years of “parental resignation” programmes for employees with children aged below seven, on top of a two-year childcare leave, with the guarantee of returning to the same position.

There are limits, however. Despite the government policy to support paternity leave — a father with a child under eight can take up to a year and a half off — men taking the leave remains at a single-digit rate at most banks because of social norms that still regard childcare and household duties as a woman’s job.

Despite the high proportion of female workers, few are at executive level in the financial sector, as most women work in retail banking, rather than higher-margin businesses such as corporate and investment banking, which are seen as better for promotions.

“There are equal opportunities for hiring, but they are not equal positions,” says Park Ju-geun, head of Leaders Index, noting there is still a 30 per cent pay gap in banking. “Women still don’t have many opportunities for promotions as they are barred from key operations like strategic planning, sales, marketing and treasury departments.”

The number of female executives is increasing after legislation in 2022 banned single-gender boards at companies with assets of more than Won2tn. But women still hold only 12.7 per cent of executive positions at South Korean banks, although this is higher than the 8.1 per cent average across the country’s 500 biggest companies, according to Leaders Index.

There are signs of improvement, however. Internet-only lender Toss Bank and the South Korean unit of Citibank both have female chief executives, while some banks offer leadership and mentoring programmes for women.

“Women are often hired for supplementary positions, so most fail to move up the ladder,” says Oh Hee-jung, deputy head of the Korean Finance & Service Workers’ Union. “Like in other sectors, the glass ceiling still exists in the financial sector, with most women struggling to shatter it.”

Every morning, Zhou sifts his way through the crowds of hopeful workers, factory owners and snake oil sellers that throng the open air labour market in Datang, Guangzhou in the hope of finding suitable work.

Wading into a crowd of hopefuls surrounding a clothing factory manager perched on a bicycle one day last month, he picks up the half-finished lace top on display, weighs it in his hands and shakes his head: the pay per item is too low for a work that intricate.

Zhou, who declined to give a full name, is one of at least 200mn people in China working in the “gig economy”, a growing, informal sector of the labour market that spans everything from delivery drivers to construction workers. And while China’s fast fashion industry has long relied on nimble day labourers like Zhou, analysts say the increasing use of short-term labour in manufacturing is harming the country’s human capital and putting workers at risk.

“We’re a new generation of workers with a new generation of thinking,” says Zhou, a wiry and moustachioed worker in his 30s who moved to the garment production hub of Guangzhou eight years ago from the central province of Hubei. Although more flexible, he ends up working 12 hours a day, often seven days a week. “We wake up, work, finish work, sleep: it’s a two-point line.”

Officially, Chinese companies are only supposed to employ a maximum 10 per cent of their staff on a short-term basis. But analysts say that in recent years, the proportion of temporary workers in the manufacturing sector has crept up, making life more precarious for a huge swath of the workforce and undermining labourers’ ability to learn new skills.

For instance, a study by Peking University academic Zhang Dandan estimated that there were approximately 40mn short-term workers in the manufacturing sector by 2024, or about 31 per cent of the total. Previous surveys from five provinces suggested that the proportion of flexible workers was 20 per cent in 2017, after exhibiting a “significant upward trend” in the previous seven years, she wrote.

Many Chinese factory workers are employed in long-term, full-time roles and sometimes remain at individual factories for decades. Under such conditions, they are entitled to workplace and health insurance, protection from unfair dismissal, a degree of training and, after a certain period of service, retirement and other benefits.

Hiring temporary workers, either through contract labour agencies or via open air markets such as the one in Datang, can give factory managers more flexibility and lower costs by reducing payments for training and other benefits. For workers, it can mean greater choice over where to work and, in the short term, higher pay, as many receive bonuses for completing stints at each plant.

We wake up, work, finish work, sleep: it’s a two-point line

But it also leaves them exposed. Most day workers and many agency labourers do not have contracts or workplace insurance and are clustered in the most low-skilled part of the production process, such as the final assembly of electronics.

Analysts warn that the funnelling of large numbers of workers into tedious jobs that offer little chance of training or career advancement could create a skills deficit in the future and impede social mobility.

“Contract labour becomes this very convenient way of just having this flexibility without the risk of any long-term commitments, without the risks of paying compensation, or the difficulties of firing people,” says Dmitri Kessler, founder of the Economic Rights Institute.

Kessler says that using short-term labourers in electronics manufacturing also allows factories quickly to replace workers hurt when performing physically arduous tasks or exposed to harmful activities. “From our perspective, it’s extremely problematic,” he says.

Moreover, because hourly wages for temporary roles are often higher than for fixed work — though still cost the employer less given reduced additional benefits — many workers end up opting for short-term roles with little prospect of advancement and do not care about the companies they work for.

“You develop a kind of a dependence on the most base level of employment . . . that has an impact on the productivity of the workers themselves,” says Kessler.

Jenny Chan, a sociologist at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, says that some factories can employ as many as 70 per cent of their workers on a temporary basis during peak seasons, although an absolute number is difficult to pin down. “This is definitely a more precarious, very fluid form of labour,” she says.

The proportion of workers employed on a temporary basis has increased since about 2008, following both the global financial crisis and China’s introduction of a stricter labour law that offers greater protections to full-time workers, she says.

As the growing usage started to attract greater government scrutiny, some factories turned to the country’s network of vocational schools to send trainees or interns to meet their staffing needs. Renewed scrutiny of the use of vulnerable student workers has only pushed the practice underground, she says. “They have been continuing the practice . . . they just made it more difficult to identify.”

Mo, a temporary garment factory worker in his 30s who declined to give a full name, says he went through a variety of short-term roles in the services sector before arriving in the Datang garment manufacturing district to find work.

Nowadays, he adds, outside of the most skilled jobs, lots of employment in China is offered on a flexible basis.

“You just make yourself OK from one day to the next. But if you want to get married, have a family, you definitely can’t think like this,” Mo says of his life as a day labourer while he peruses yellow posters advertising roles in Datang. “Doing this kind of work is a rotten state of affairs.”

In a factory complex in Noida, an industrial hub outside New Delhi, Vinod Sharma, the managing director of an Indian electronic component maker, is trying to improve the skills of a small part of India’s vast but poorly trained workforce.

“We teach people from zero,” says Sharma at Deki Electronics, which supplies capacitors to an array of industries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Even day-to-day life in the workplace has to be taught, he says. “We have to go to the extent of teaching them how to walk on the stairs, how to walk in the corridor, because they have never been in a building like this,” says Sharma.

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi focused on boosting Swadeshi — locally made products — as punitive US tariffs squeeze export industries and threaten to put a damper on the world’s fastest-growing large economy, the opportunities for India’s workforce of more than 600mn have rarely been greater.

Yet government officials and leaders in industries from services to manufacturing to energy lament a critical shortfall of practical training, digital literacy and soft skills.

Modi has said that “skill development and employment are crucial needs in India”, at a time when he is luring in multinationals such as Apple, as he seeks to establish India as a manufacturing and services hub to rival the likes of China.

The UN’s most recent estimates from June have put the country’s population at 1.46bn, comfortably ahead of China’s 1.41bn, with nearly 68 per cent of Indians falling within the working age group of 15 to 64.

But only 4.4 per cent of its workforce aged 15 to 29 is formally skilled, according to India’s finance ministry, while the skill development ministry acknowledged that only just over half of India’s graduates have the “skills needed by a modern economy”.

This is “significantly lower than other large Asian economies”, noted a World Bank report last year, adding that “although India’s education system is of high quality, the supply of skilled labour is mediocre”.

According to the International Labour Organization, India’s “industry involvement in training is still low” with only 36 per cent of companies participating in upskilling programmes, against 85 per cent in China, 52 per cent in Russia, and 51 per cent in Brazil.

This year Modi kicked off several training and internship schemes, including a flagship government project with India’s top 500 public and private companies — including Jindal, Reliance and Tata — aimed at addressing the yawning skills gap. It has a five-year goal of placing 10mn young workers in industries including energy, automotive, food and banking.

Anil Bahuguna, chief of skill development at state-run energy company ONGC, which is participating in one of the government’s programmes, says that when it comes to oil and gas, the available labour force has “low technical exposure to field machinery and this adversely impacts the time and cost of a project”.

As India “navigates rapid technological and economic change, skills gaps, cited by 65 per cent of organisations as a major barrier, threaten to slow progress”, the government said when it rolled out “India Skills Accelerator” this year, the latest in a string of training programmes aimed at boosting employability.

These programmes form part of a drive to move away from India’s traditional placement landscape where workers used to get basic training through jobs in small and medium-sized enterprises.

“India’s skilling infrastructure has always been very, very small,” says Pronab Sen, an economist and former principal economic adviser to India’s Planning Commission, adding that as the economy expands and grows more sophisticated, “we need to meet the demands of the organised sector, the big companies”.

Abhinav Baliyan, managing director of Educator Extraordinaire, a company that runs vocational training centres in Jharkhand, says India has been unable to cash in fully on its “demographic dividend” of a vast growing working-age population.

This is partly because of a poorly skilled workforce. Four-in-five employers have reported difficulty finding the skilled talent they need in 2025, says recruiter Manpower, more than the global average, even as India has a higher demand for workers with IT and data skills than in China and Singapore.

While the Confederation of Indian Industry estimates that 10mn to 12mn young people enter the labour market annually, some 300mn farm and non-farm workers are already in need of being skilled, reskilled or upskilled to “achieve higher productivity”, says Manish Sabharwal of recruitment company Teamlease.

There are more people that need skills than what we can actually offer in general

But the growing population could also put further pressure on fast-skilling the workforce. For Sourav Roy, chief of corporate social responsibility at Tata Steel, “there are more people that need skills than what we can actually offer in general” in India.

Rituparna Chakraborty, a board member at the Goa Institute of Management, says: “I don’t think we’ll ever have enough skilled people because India is in a position where more and more jobs will come dragging more people into the workforce, which means skilled workforce demand will keep on going up.”

Online skilling platform upGrad’s chair Ronnie Screwvala says that at the moment, India has a large pool of well-trained engineers and graduate-level workers in technology and computer sciences, but not enough focus has been put on practical skills. Indians now need training that “can offer immediate relevance”.

That much is clear to Ayush Tiwari, a graduate in biotechnology and beneficiary of the latest government programme. He is now an intern at the waste management unit of listed chemical company DCM Shriram in the state of Uttar Pradesh: “In the past six months, I have learned practically what I yearned for when I was studying.”

Back in Noida, 18-year-old Sachin Kumar, who travelled 700km to take a placement at what Deki calls its “Garden of Knowledge” training centre, is one beneficiary of India’s latest push on skills development. “I am not just learning to be a machine operator, but pretty much how to do anything at all,” he says.