Gender discrimination and patriarchal norms

Gender discrimination and patriarchal norms in Kim Jiyoung’s life work less as a single prohibition than as a pattern of ordinary arrangements: who receives the better portion, who is expected to wait, who is considered for a job, and who gives up work when a child needs care. The novel traces how these practices can feel natural even to those disadvantaged by them, while showing how personal experience makes their accumulated effects visible.

Unequal Treatment as Family Routine

In childhood, the hierarchy at home was expressed through small, repeated decisions. When Kim Jiyoung and Kim Eunyoung reached for their baby brother’s formula, their grandmother’s response conveyed that his possessions were precious and that the girls had no claim to them. The message was delivered through her tone and posture as much as through her words: the boy’s needs ranked above theirs. The scene makes unequal treatment legible before either girl has the language to name it as discrimination.

The same ranking governed food and household goods. Rice from the cooker went first to their father, brother, and grandmother; their brother received the intact pieces of tofu, dumplings, and patties, while the girls ate those that had fallen apart. He had matching school and lunch bags, clothing, and belongings; the girls shared umbrellas, blankets, and treats when there were only two. Kim Jiyoung did not initially understand this as favoritism. She explained the sharing to herself as generosity between sisters, while their mother praised them for caring for their brother and not competing for affection. Praise made protest harder: a child who was told she was being good by accepting less had little room to object without seeming selfish.

The novel presents this domestic pattern as learned rather than exceptional. The girls were not explicitly told to prepare for marriage or to become good wives, mothers, and cooks. They did chores, but understood them as helping busy parents and looking after themselves. Their parents urged them to study, maintain good habits, and pursue education, reflecting a broader change in which girls’ schooling and ambitions had become widely accepted. Yet that encouragement existed alongside assumptions that women would eventually bear the principal responsibility for children. The result was a mixed message: girls could imagine careers, but gender could still narrow their choices at decisive moments.

School Order and the Limits of Recognition

School repeated the hierarchy in public, administrative forms. In Kim Jiyoung’s class of forty-nine, boys occupied roster numbers one through twenty-seven and girls numbers twenty-eight through forty-nine, with numbers assigned by birthday. Because students entered the dining hall in roster order, boys as a group went first, while girls with later birthdays could sit down only as earlier-numbered classmates were finishing. Slow eaters were mostly girls, and they were the ones most often rushed by the teacher. A system presented as a neutral numbering procedure therefore organized a gendered difference in who waited and who was reprimanded.

The students did sometimes resist unfairness. After a particularly harsh lunch period, the slow eaters met after school and complained; their protest led the teacher to reverse the dining order and switch it each month. The change brought a real, if limited, sense of accomplishment: the children had challenged an authority and altered an arrangement. Kim Jiyoung also worked hard enough to leave the slow-eaters group. But changing the order did not make the wider atmosphere fair, and the girls did not then question why boys had held the first numbers in the first place. Across school routines, boys led lines and presentations and had homework checked first. Such precedence was so familiar that it seemed natural, much like the convention that men’s national identification numbers began with one and women’s with two.

Leadership offered another version of the same contradiction. Girls were often considered smarter, more mature, and better at detailed tasks; teachers relied on them to run errands, grade quizzes, and check homework. Yet all six class-monitor elections in Kim Jiyoung’s class from fourth through sixth grade produced male monitors. Girls were consistently assigned the class-environment role and boys the sports role. When Kim Jiyoung’s mother later read that girls made up more than 40 percent of class monitors, she took it as striking progress. The figure’s significance lay in the distance still remaining: less than half was celebrated because representation had risen from a much lower level.

Hiring, Advancement, and the Meaning of Merit

The same gap between formal opportunity and practical access followed Kim Jiyoung into employment. Before applying for jobs, she remained hopeful that a company’s values and the work itself mattered more than its size. Her friend Yun Hyejin, a year older and a stronger candidate by several conventional measures, was more pessimistic. Hyejin had a higher grade-point average, a better TOEIC score, computer certificates, and a degree in a field favored by employers, yet she doubted that she would find a reliable employer, much less enter a large company. She pointed out that alumni appearing at job fairs were men. Kim Jiyoung then recognized that she had attended such events without seeing a female alumnus.

Hiring figures from the year Kim Jiyoung graduated sharpen that personal realization. Women made up 29.6 percent of new employees at one hundred companies, a share reported as a substantial improvement. In a separate survey of recruiting managers at fifty large corporations, 44 percent preferred male candidates when qualifications were equivalent; none preferred women. Bias also operated through less visible channels. Business departments sometimes received informal requests to recommend candidates, but, according to Hyejin, the recommendations could be restricted to male students. Because the process was kept discreet, it was difficult to establish whether departments were selecting men or companies had specifically asked for them. The opacity itself made exclusion harder to challenge.

A former student’s experience showed how merit could be acknowledged and then overridden. She had been at the top of her class for four years and had a strong record of language scores, awards, internships, certificates, clubs, and volunteer work. Nevertheless, when a company sought candidates through her department, four men were selected for interviews and she was not. After she demanded the recommendation criteria and threatened to make the matter public, she received explanations invoking the company’s preference for men, military service, and men’s expected role as household heads. The department head’s response turned her effort to seek an explanation into evidence against her, describing smart women as difficult to deal with. She eventually obtained a position through open recruitment, but resigned after about six months. At work she saw no women above a certain pay grade; when she asked colleagues, including a department head, about maternity leave, none knew how long it lasted because they had never seen an employee take it. Her departure was met with a complaint that this was why the company did not hire women. She answered, in effect, that women left because the company made it impossible for them to stay. The sequence exposes a self-reinforcing logic: women’s absence is treated as proof that hiring them is impractical, while the conditions producing that absence go unexamined.

Childcare, Work, and Constrained Choice

The expectation that women absorb family care became especially consequential when Kim Jiyoung approached childbirth. She and Jung Daehyun wrote out three possibilities on a large sheet of paper: her returning to work immediately, returning after a year of maternity leave, or not returning. For each, they considered who would care for the child, the cost, and other advantages and disadvantages. If both continued working, the practical alternatives were sending the child to Jung Daehyun’s parents in Busan or hiring a live-in nanny. His parents were willing, but elderly, and his mother had recently undergone back surgery. The couple hesitated over a live-in nanny because the arrangement would involve not only childcare but also sharing their household routine and family life; cost and the uncertain duration of the arrangement added further concerns.

They concluded that one parent would have to stay home, and that parent was Kim Jiyoung. Jung Daehyun’s job was more stable and paid more, but the decision also followed the prevailing convention that husbands work while wives care for children and manage the home. Knowing this outcome was likely did not make it less depressing for her. Jung Daehyun suggested that they might later use a sitter or daycare while she studied and looked for other work, framing the interruption as an opportunity for a new chapter. Yet the immediate decision was still a career exit shaped by both economic calculation and gender expectation.

The financial pressure did not disappear when childcare became more manageable. After the couple had paid off a loan on their flat’s deposit, the landlord raised the deposit by 60 million won at the end of the two-year lease, forcing them to borrow again. They could not afford to buy a home for three on Jung Daehyun’s income alone, and future mortgage, kindergarten, and after-school costs made the prospect harder. Kim Jiyoung felt pressure to earn. She knew mothers who returned to work when their children entered daycare, but their routes often differed from their former careers: freelance work, private tutoring, cram-school teaching, small tutoring groups, or part-time jobs as cashiers, waitresses, telemarketers, and service workers. Reports indicated that more than half of women who left jobs could not find new work for over five years; those who did return often entered more menial work, smaller workplaces, and lower-paid sectors. Childcare thus affected not just whether a woman worked, but the kind of work and future advancement available to her.

Experience, Expertise, and Recognition

The novel’s retrospective medical frame shows how these conditions can remain invisible to people who have not had to bear them. In 2016, a psychiatrist summarized Kim Jiyoung’s life from her and her husband’s accounts. He had initially understood her symptoms as postnatal depression that developed into childcare depression, but as treatment continued, he became less certain that his first diagnosis captured her experience. He noted that she could describe long-buried memories calmly and clearly, and acknowledged that he might have reached his conclusion too quickly. His reassessment does not erase the diagnosis; it reveals the limits of interpreting a woman’s distress without understanding the circumstances that have shaped it.

The psychiatrist also reflected on his own position. He believed that, as an average man in his forties, he might otherwise have lived without recognizing what it meant to be a woman and a mother in Korea. His wife’s career had repeatedly narrowed—from pursuing a university professorship in ophthalmology to contract work and then giving up her career—and following those compromises had made the structure visible to him. The contrast is between professional authority and lived knowledge: his occupation did not automatically give him insight into care work or its costs.

That gap appeared at home as well. When the couple’s son began school, his mother coordinated school pickup and after-school activities around her work. Before summer vacation, the school called after he injured a classmate with a pencil; teachers also reported disruptive behavior. The psychiatrist initially disagreed with the teacher’s suspicion of ADHD, although his wife challenged how little time he spent with their son and how distracted he was during it. He conceded that her criticism was true. The teacher recommended that his wife suspend work and provide full-time care, and she did so, taking on the child’s daily routines and arranging lessons while sleeping in his room. She had planned a route back to work through a senior colleague, but later canceled it because their son had not improved. In this parallel account, a mother’s career again becomes the flexible resource that absorbs a family’s care needs. The novel’s pattern is cumulative: unequal expectations are maintained by everyday habits, reinforced by institutions, and most readily recognized by those whose lives have made their costs impossible to ignore.