Glass Ceiling

The Glass Ceiling in Kim Jiyoung’s story is not a single rule barring women from promotion but a chain of decisions that narrows their prospects: male-biased recruitment, unequal assignment of opportunity, assumptions about future childcare, and working conditions that make it harder for women to remain. The novel connects these workplace mechanisms to the unpaid labor of family life, showing how women can be disadvantaged both before they enter a job and after they have built a career.

Definition and Evidence

The pattern first becomes visible to Kim Jiyoung through Yun Hyejin, a study-group member who has stronger grades, test results, and credentials than Jiyoung, as well as a degree in a field employers favor. Hyejin nevertheless doubts she will find a dependable employer. She points to the absence of women among the alumni representatives at job fairs. Jiyoung recalls that she had attended such events since the start of her senior year and had not seen a female alumnus. The gap between Hyejin’s qualifications and expectations exposes a labor market in which credentials alone do not determine access.

Data cited in the novel gives that experience a wider frame. In 2005, women made up 29.6 percent of new employees at 100 companies, a figure reported as a substantial improvement. In a separate survey of recruiting managers at 50 large corporations that year, 44 percent said they would prefer a male candidate when qualifications were equivalent; none chose women. These figures locate the problem not in women’s preparation but in employers’ preferences and in the pathways through which candidates are selected.

Recruitment and Unequal Access

Yun Hyejin describes informal recruitment requests routed through business departments or individual professors. Although the arrangements are difficult to verify, the candidates recommended are male students. The process can thus filter women out before an open competition begins, while leaving no clear record of who made the decision or why.

A graduate’s experience makes that mechanism concrete. She had ranked at the top of her class for four years and assembled an impressive record of language scores, awards, internships, certificates, student activities, and volunteer work. When a company sought candidates through her department, four male students were sent for interviews and she was not considered. After she challenged the recommendation process, the explanations she received included the company’s apparent preference for men, compensation for men’s mandatory military service, and the claim that men would become heads of households. The department head also treated her complaint itself as evidence that a capable, assertive woman was difficult to deal with. She eventually obtained a position through open recruitment, but left after about six months. She later passed the law exam, becoming the first graduate from her college in many years to do so.

Her departure reveals that access to a job is not the same as access to a sustainable career. At that company she found no women above a certain pay grade. When she asked how long maternity leave lasted after seeing a pregnant employee, none of the five colleagues at her table, including a department head, knew; none had seen an employee take it. She concluded that she could not imagine herself there ten years later and resigned. Her boss blamed women for not staying, while her answer located the cause in the conditions that made staying difficult.

Advancement, Pay, and Retention

Kim Jiyoung encounters the same logic inside her marketing company. When management forms a planning team intended to develop campaigns and attract clients over the long term, she expresses interest and is told she would be suited to the work. The team nevertheless goes to three competent middle managers and two male colleagues who started alongside her and Kang Hyesu. Jiyoung and Kang Hyesu had established good reputations; colleagues had even remarked that the two men had more to learn and were given easier clients. Their exclusion therefore cannot be explained simply by a record of weaker performance.

A later conversation reveals the selection principle. The company head considers the agency’s hours and intensity incompatible with childcare and does not regard women as prospective long-term employees. Rather than improve hours or benefits, he invests in men he expects to remain in the existing work environment. Jiyoung and Kang Hyesu receive more demanding clients, not because management considers them less capable, but because it wants to avoid tiring the men selected for the planning team. The exclusion also alters the women’s relationships with their male colleagues: their busy group chat, coffee breaks, lunches, and evenings out fade after the men join the elite team. Jiyoung continues her assigned work, but her confidence that diligence will bring advancement is weakened.

The national figures extend this workplace experience beyond one firm. In 2014, women working in Korea earned 63 percent of men’s earnings, compared with an 84 percent average across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The Economist’s glass-ceiling index ranked Korea worst among the surveyed countries for working women. Women’s representation among managers did rise, from 10.22 percent in 2006 to 18.37 percent in 2014, but remained below two in ten. Maternity-leave use increased from 20 percent in 2003 to more than half in 2009, while four in ten women still worked without taking it. These measures describe gradual change alongside continuing disparities; they also cannot include women who had already left work because of marriage, pregnancy, or childbirth.

Care Responsibilities and Career Costs

The novel traces the assumptions behind these patterns into Kim Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun’s decision about having a child. Jiyoung worries that she may lose her health, youth, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future, while Daehyun’s anticipated sacrifices center on fewer evenings with friends, earlier returns home, and helping with chores. His more secure and better-paid job later becomes a practical reason for Jiyoung to leave work, but the choice is also shaped by the convention that husbands work while wives care for children. Their discussion and planning do not erase the unequal consequences: the decision is negotiated within circumstances that make her career the more readily expendable one.

After Jung Jiwon starts daycare a little after her first birthday, Jiyoung has approximately three hours between drop-off and pickup. Most of that time goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food. The cited statistics put the difference between a stay-at-home mother with a child under two and a mother whose child attends daycare at just fifteen minutes of personal time per day. Daycare gives Jiyoung a chance to complete chores without the baby beside her, not a simple release from domestic work. At the same time, the family faces a 60-million-won increase in its rental deposit and takes on another loan; the pressure to earn income grows as housing, living, and education costs rise.

Returning to paid work does not necessarily restore a woman’s former career. The novel describes mothers taking freelance work, tutoring, or part-time jobs in retail and service work, while reports indicate that more than half of women who leave jobs cannot find new work for over five years. Those who return commonly move into more menial positions, smaller workplaces, and lower-paid sectors. The range of available work therefore reflects not only personal preference but the loss of occupational standing during a period of care and the difficulty of re-entering employment on comparable terms.

Resistance and Significance

Kim Eunsil’s career demonstrates both the pressure to adapt to a male workplace and the possibility of changing its practices. She joined her company when it had only three employees and tried to be accepted as one of the men: she stayed latest at company dinners, volunteered for late work and business trips, and returned just a month after giving birth. The men who had worked with her moved into leadership roles or started firms and continued working; none of her female colleagues remained in the field. Eunsil later came to feel that her own example had helped set an unfair standard for other women.

After entering management, she removed unnecessary dinners, retreats, and workshops and guaranteed maternity and paternity leave. She took particular pride in welcoming a team member back with flowers after a year-long maternity leave—the first such return in the company’s history. Her changes do not undo the wider pattern, but they show that workplace expectations are made and can be revised. Across the recruitment stories, the planning-team decision, the pay and promotion figures, and the demands of childcare, the Glass Ceiling takes shape as an interconnected structure: employers anticipate women’s care responsibilities, workplaces fail to accommodate them, and the resulting exits are then used to justify the original preference for men.