Decline in South Korean Women's Employment After Childbirth

Decline in South Korean Women's Employment After Childbirth is presented as a widespread pattern in which marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare push women out of paid work or make returning to comparable jobs difficult. Through Kim Jiyoung’s departure from her marketing job and her later search for work compatible with caring for her daughter, the novel traces how that decline is produced by practical constraints and gendered expectations rather than by a lack of ability or professional commitment.

Scale and Career Disruption

In 2014, around the time Kim Jiyoung left her company, one in five married women in South Korea had quit work because of marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, or the education of young children. The employment figures presented alongside this account show a marked fall across women’s working lives: the participation rate is 63.8 percent among women aged twenty to twenty-nine, 58 percent among those aged thirty to thirty-nine, and 66.7 percent among women over forty. The decrease during the years when many women have children, followed by a rise in the older age group, gives the phenomenon a recognizable arc: work may be interrupted during child-rearing years, but the interruption does not mean that women lacked the capacity or desire to work.

Jiyoung’s own job had been her first workplace and an important source of independence. She liked her colleagues, took satisfaction in completing assignments, and valued managing her life with money she had earned. Leaving was therefore not simply an exchange of an unwanted job for a preferred domestic life. The novel emphasizes that she was neither incompetent nor lazy; she lost a workplace that had brought her accomplishment and a sense of autonomy because caring for a child and sustaining two careers could not be reconciled under the couple’s circumstances.

The story also shows the pressures inside paid employment before Jiyoung becomes a mother. Client interactions at the marketing agency could be awkward and difficult to navigate: older male clients made misogynistic jokes, while Jiyoung and her coworkers had to manage the social consequences of either laughing or not laughing. At a client dinner, she was steered into the seat beside a senior male manager despite wanting to sit with her colleagues, and her team leader, Kim Eunsil, later arrived to find her already there. These episodes form part of the work environment Jiyoung is leaving, but they do not make her professional life meaningless: her job still gave her valued work, relationships, and earned income. The tension is that women must navigate unequal treatment in employment and then face the risk that caregiving will remove them from it.

Family Decisions and Unequal Costs

Before childbirth, Jiyoung worried that she could not combine her career with childcare. She had little direct experience of pregnancy or caring for a newborn, and she and Jung Daehyun both regularly worked late and on weekends. Daycare and babysitters did not appear sufficient for those schedules, while neither set of parents was in a position to provide dependable care. Jiyoung also felt guilty at the prospect of arranging care for a child before the child had even been born. Jung Daehyun listened and offered to take on practical tasks, including changing diapers, feeding the baby, and washing the baby’s clothes.

Jiyoung challenged the way the couple’s discussion concentrated on what she might give up. She named her youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future as things placed at stake by having a child, then asked what Jung Daehyun would lose. His answer centered on coming home earlier, seeing friends less often, feeling uncomfortable about late work and business dinners, and helping with household chores after work; he also described financial support as his responsibility as head of the household. Jiyoung found this prospective list of sacrifices slight beside the possibility that her own life would be thrown off course. The exchange makes visible an imbalance within a conversation that is formally shared: the anticipated costs of parenthood fall much more heavily on her.

As her due date approached, the couple put three possibilities on a large sheet of paper: an immediate return to work, a return after a year of maternity leave, or no return. For each, they considered who would care for the child, the cost, and other advantages and disadvantages. If both continued working, the options were to send their daughter to Jung Daehyun’s parents in Busan or hire a live-in nanny. The first was not practical because his parents were elderly and his mother had recently undergone back surgery. The couple were reluctant to bring a nanny into their home and daily family life, and the expense added another obstacle. They concluded that one parent would have to stay home. Jung Daehyun’s job was more stable and paid more, and the customary arrangement was for husbands to work and wives to raise children and run the home, so they decided that Jiyoung would leave her job. Knowing that this outcome was likely did not make her less depressed.

The Work Behind Staying Home

After Jiyoung left work, the loss did not end with her last commute. She did not cry as she informed the company, cleared her things from the office, or attended her farewell; the tears came the next day, when she woke to a routine without an office to go to and realized that she could no longer plan her day around work. The novel places this private moment beside a broader account of women’s employment, connecting a particular career interruption to a recurring social pattern.

Caregiving also creates practical barriers before a mother can even consider a return. Another member of Jiyoung’s workplace team had a child, and most of her paycheck went to a babysitter. Late nights and weekends made childcare arrangements precarious; she was repeatedly searching for someone to watch the child at short notice and arguing with her husband over the phone. After bringing her baby to work one weekend, she quit. Kim Eunsil, who had received the subordinate’s apology for leaving, did not know what to say. The episode shows how inflexible work demands and the cost and availability of care can combine to make continued employment untenable.

For Jiyoung, her daughter Jung Jiwon began daycare a little after turning twelve months old and settled in well. The day was organized around drop-off at 9:30 a.m., a snack, playtime, lunch, and pickup before 1 p.m., followed by washing and a nap at home. This gave Jiyoung about three hours apart from drop-off and pickup, but most of that time went to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food and snacks. She hardly had time to sit down with coffee. Statistics in the narrative estimate that a stay-at-home mother with a child under two has four hours and ten minutes to herself each day, while a mother whose child attends daycare has four hours and twenty-five minutes. The fifteen-minute difference underscores that daycare does not simply convert mothers’ time into leisure; it may allow them to do housework without the child beside them.

The novel questions the tendency to treat domestic labor as effortless because appliances have reduced some physical tasks. When a doctor dismissed Jiyoung’s complaints by comparing present-day housework with the labor women once did without machines, her unspoken counterpoint was that laundry and cleaning still required work and attention. The narrative also observes that domestic labor is alternately demeaned as idleness or praised as life-sustaining work, while its monetary value goes uncalculated. That invisibility matters to employment: a mother can be understood as not working while carrying out the daily labor that makes other household activities possible.

Return to Work and Its Limits

The consequences of leaving a job extend beyond the immediate period of infant care. The narrative reports that more than half of women who quit work are unable to find new employment for more than five years. Women who do return commonly enter jobs more menial than their previous work. The share working in places with four or fewer employees doubles; fewer work in manufacturing and office jobs, while more move into hotels, restaurants, and sales. Pay also frequently falls. The resulting return is not necessarily a return to the same occupation, working conditions, or prospects: time away from employment can redirect women into smaller workplaces and lower-paid sectors.

Jiyoung encounters this landscape as family expenses intensify. After the couple’s two-year lease ended, the landlord raised the rental deposit by 60 million won, requiring another loan. Jung Daehyun’s income alone could not make buying a home feasible, and future kindergarten and after-school costs would add to the pressure. Jiyoung felt a need to earn money, but a need for income did not guarantee access to work commensurate with her previous career. She knew mothers who freelanced, tutored, taught at cram schools, or took part-time jobs as cashiers, waitresses, telemarketers, service workers, or water-filter technicians. Many such jobs offered a way to earn while a child was in care, but the broader figures show the occupational and pay losses that often accompany this path.

The social judgment directed at mothers who use daycare compounds these constraints. Women are censured for supposedly using childcare time for coffee, beauty appointments, or shopping, even though many mothers in that position work minimum-wage jobs in restaurants, coffee shops, or department stores. Jiyoung begins to wonder about the working women she sees: whether they have children, how old the children are, and who is caring for them. The questions connect her own situation to a larger pattern in which women’s paid work and care responsibilities remain difficult to separate, while the strain of a stagnant economy, high living costs, and adverse work conditions is not confined to women.

A weekday job at an ice-cream shop offers Jiyoung a concrete possibility. The posting seeks part-time workers from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 5,600 won an hour and welcomes housewives. The current worker, a mother of two, has worked there for four years while her children were in daycare, but is leaving because her oldest is starting first grade. Her account of gradually getting used to the work suggests a manageable routine, yet her departure also shows how employment organized around children’s schedules can remain contingent on changes in family care. The novel leaves Jiyoung at the point of exploring work, not with a claim that she has recovered her former career. Her search makes the central distinction clear: access to a part-time job is not the same as restoration of the professional path interrupted by childbirth.