Yun Hyejin

Yun Hyejin is a college student who becomes Kim Jiyoung’s close collaborator in preparing for work and an important source of knowledge about gender discrimination in hiring. More academically accomplished than Jiyoung and initially more pessimistic about their prospects, Hyejin sees that credentials alone cannot explain who gets access to jobs. Her observations turn Jiyoung’s abstract unease into a concrete understanding of how women can be excluded before recruitment even becomes visible.

Identity and Background

Hyejin studies business management at the same college as Jiyoung. She is a year older, but they are in the same academic year because Hyejin took a year off. The two meet through classes at a local cultural center, where Jiyoung has gone less to study than to make connections. A small group forms around the classes: it begins with three people, grows as members bring friends, and eventually settles at seven regular participants. Hyejin is among the people Jiyoung gets along with and comes to rely on.

The group gives its members practical company in the uncertain passage from college to employment. They exchange information about openings, work together on CVs and cover letters, take part in volunteer activities and corporate monitoring, and apply for internships. Hyejin and Jiyoung also enter competitions as a team, winning several prizes in local-government contests and challenges for college students. Their friendship is therefore built not only through conversation but through shared work: gathering opportunities, preparing applications, and testing their abilities together.

A More Cautious View of Employment

Before Jiyoung begins sending applications and attending interviews, she remains hopeful that a suitable company and interesting work will be enough, even if the employer is not a large corporation. Hyejin is less confident. By the measures Jiyoung can see, Hyejin is the stronger candidate: she has a higher GPA, a better TOEIC score, computer-skills certificates, and a degree in a field employers prefer. Yet she doubts that even a company that pays its employees on time is assured to hire her. Her pessimism is not presented as a lack of preparation; it arises from her view of how recruitment works.

Hyejin points to the elite universities that dominate employers’ attention, then draws Jiyoung’s attention to a further absence: at the job fairs and alumni events Jiyoung has attended since the start of senior year, she has not seen a single female alumnus. The observation changes what Jiyoung thinks she is seeing. The people held up as evidence that graduates from their college can succeed are men; their visibility does not establish that women have the same route into employment. A survey from the year Jiyoung graduated, 2005, found that women made up 29.6 percent of new employees at 100 companies, a figure described as a substantial improvement. In a separate survey, 44 percent of recruiting managers at fifty large corporations said they would prefer a male candidate when qualifications were equivalent, while none said they would prefer a woman.

The Informal Gate to Recruitment

Hyejin explains that business-management departments sometimes receive unofficial requests from companies, either through the department office or individual professors. Students may be recommended for interviews without the process being publicly clear. According to her, those recommendations go to male students. Because the arrangements are kept out of view, it is hard to establish whether a college is selecting only men or whether a company has specifically asked for them. The opacity is itself consequential: when criteria and candidates are hidden, a woman who is passed over may not even know that a route to an interview existed.

To show what this can mean for an individual, Hyejin tells Jiyoung about a woman who graduated several years earlier. The woman had been top of her class throughout all four years and had strong foreign-language exam results, awards, internships, certificates, and student-club and volunteer experience. She was interested in a particular company, but learned only afterward that her department had received a request for candidates and selected four men for interviews. She discovered the arrangement through one of those men, who had failed the interview and complained about it.

The graduate challenged her adviser, asking for the recommendation criteria and threatening to make the matter public unless she received a legitimate explanation. Her complaint moved up to the department head, but the explanations she received invoked the company’s apparent preference for men, compensation for years men had lost to military service, and men’s presumed future role as household heads. The department head’s final response framed her insistence on an answer as a problem in itself, calling smart women taxing. The woman eventually stopped pursuing the complaint and obtained a job through open recruitment at the end of that year. Hyejin’s example shows that exceptional achievement did not secure access to the informal channel, and that challenging the exclusion could itself be used to discredit the candidate.

What Hyejin’s Account Reveals

The graduate stayed at the company for only about six months. After joining, she saw that there were no women above a certain pay grade. When she asked about maternity leave after noticing a pregnant employee in the dining hall, none of the five people at her table, including a department head, knew how long it lasted; none had seen an employee take it. She concluded that she could not picture a future there and resigned. Her boss responded by blaming women for not staying. She answered that women left because the company made staying impossible.

This ending gives Hyejin’s account its force: recruitment and retention are connected. A woman may be admitted through open recruitment after being excluded from a recommendation, yet still find no credible prospect of advancement or support for maternity leave. Hyejin does not claim that the graduate lacked ability or ambition; the facts she recounts make the company’s structure, rather than the woman’s qualifications, the decisive obstacle. For Jiyoung, Hyejin’s clear-eyed reading marks a shift from hoping that a congenial workplace will reward effort to recognizing that gender can shape access, status, and the possibility of remaining employed.