Gender Inequality Across South Korean Society

Gender inequality in South Korean society appears in the novel not as a single prohibition but as a pattern of ordinary arrangements that accumulate across family, school, work, and home. Kim Jiyoung grows up in a household where her brother receives better food and matching belongings while the girls share what is available; later, as an employee and mother, she encounters gendered hiring and promotion practices and the persistent assumption that domestic labor is women’s responsibility. The pattern’s force lies in the contrast between women’s expanding aspirations and the everyday systems that narrow their choices.

Family and Schooling

In Kim Jiyoung’s childhood, family preference is expressed through the distribution of small necessities. Fresh rice is served first to her father, brother, and grandmother; the brother gets the intact pieces of food and matching school supplies, while the girls share umbrellas, blankets, and treats. The arrangement is so habitual that Jiyoung does not initially identify it as special treatment. Her mother praises the sisters for caring for their brother and not competing for affection, making it harder for Jiyoung to voice a sense of unfairness. Gender hierarchy is learned here through routine, reinforced as generosity and good conduct rather than announced as a rule.

At school, the ordering of boys and girls likewise passes as natural. When Jiyoung and other girls challenge the roster-based lunch order, the teacher changes the sequence each month. The adjustment gives them a small but meaningful experience of questioning authority and correcting an unfair practice; Jiyoung also works hard enough to leave the slow-eaters group. Yet their challenge does not extend to the larger convention that boys go first: boys lead lines and processions, present first, and have their homework checked first. The same school culture entrusts girls with errands, grading, and detailed work, while students repeatedly elect boys as class monitors. Competence is recognized in girls, but leadership continues to be associated with boys.

Education and the Promise of Opportunity

The sisters are not raised with the older expectation that girls need less education or should prepare chiefly for marriage and motherhood. Their parents emphasize study and conduct, and the girls imagine careers and compete for their ambitions. The novel places that opportunity against a changing public context: legislation against gender discrimination was introduced in 1999, and the Ministry of Gender Equality was formed in 2001. Such developments indicate that women’s education and aspirations had broad social support. But the promise is unstable. At pivotal moments, the stigma attached to being a woman resurfaces and obstructs choices, producing mixed signals rather than a simple transition from exclusion to equality.

That contradiction becomes visible as Jiyoung approaches graduation. Kim Eunyoung points out that the alumni appearing at job fairs are men; Jiyoung realizes she has attended such events since the start of her senior year without seeing a female alumnus. In 2005, women made up 29.6 percent of new hires at 100 companies, a figure reported as a major improvement. In a separate survey that year, 44 percent of recruiting managers at fifty large corporations said they would prefer a male candidate when qualifications were equivalent, while none selected women as their preferred candidates. The figures give institutional scale to the absence Jiyoung had observed in person.

Recruitment, Advancement, and Workplace Practice

Gender bias operates not only through formal applications but also through less visible routes into employment. Kim Eunyoung explains that business departments sometimes receive unofficial recruitment requests through professors or department offices, and that male students are recommended. Because the process is difficult to trace, it is unclear whether departments select men independently or respond to companies’ preferences. The uncertainty itself makes exclusion difficult to challenge.

A high-achieving female graduate illustrates the consequences. Despite four years at the top of her class and an extensive record of language scores, awards, internships, certificates, and extracurricular work, she learns that four men were recommended for interviews at a company she wanted to join. When she demands the selection criteria, the explanations invoke companies’ preference for men, military service, and men’s presumed status as future household heads. The department head dismisses her challenge as evidence that intelligent women are difficult to deal with. She eventually enters the company through open recruitment, but leaves after about six months. Finding no women above a certain pay grade, she asks colleagues about maternity leave after seeing a pregnant employee; none of the five people at the table, including a department head, knows its duration. Unable to imagine a future there, she resigns. Her boss treats her departure as proof that women should not be hired; she identifies the reverse cause: the workplace makes it impossible for women to remain.

The novel also shows exclusion within a company where women are already employed. Kim Jiyoung expresses interest in a new planning team intended to move the marketing agency beyond passively fulfilling clients’ requests and toward developing campaigns and securing steadier business. Although her work has been well regarded, she and Kang Hyesu are passed over. Three capable middle managers and the two men hired alongside Jiyoung are selected for the team, which the company treats as an elite opportunity. The two men had previously handled easier clients, yet their assignment gives them access to a new path of responsibility. Their selection also fractures the close social group they once formed with Jiyoung and Hyesu: the lively work chat and shared breaks fall away, replaced by awkward encounters.

Kim Eunsil’s career reveals both the pressure to conform and the possibility of changing workplace practices. Having joined her company when it had only three employees, she tried to be accepted as one of the men by staying latest at dinners, volunteering for late work and business trips, and returning a month after giving birth. She later feels she did wrong by women colleagues who left the field. As a manager, she eliminates unnecessary dinners, retreats, and workshops and guarantees maternity and paternity leave. When an employee returns from a year of maternity leave—the first such return in the company’s history—Eunsil welcomes her with flowers. The contrast shows how practices once treated as personal tests of commitment can be altered by management decisions.

Unpaid Care and the Limits of Rest

The assumptions governing paid work continue inside the home. After childbirth, Jiyoung is responsible for the baby, washing, and cleaning. A doctor responds to her difficulty by comparing modern appliances with the more physically demanding methods used in the past, as if reduced effort in one task erased the labor involved in completing the whole sequence. Jiyoung recognizes that laundry does not load, wash, and hang itself, and that a vacuum does not wipe floors or clean its own rags. Technology can reduce physical effort, but it does not remove the work or decide who performs it.

The novel describes domestic labor as being alternately demeaned as idleness or praised as work that sustains life, while its monetary value goes uncalculated. The absence of valuation has material significance: assigning a price would raise the question of who should pay. Statistics on mothers’ time reinforce the point. A stay-at-home mother with a child under two has, on average, four hours and ten minutes a day to herself; for a mother whose baby attends daycare, the figure is four hours and twenty-five minutes, a difference of only fifteen minutes. When Jung Jiwon begins daycare shortly after turning twelve months, her schedule leaves Jiyoung approximately three hours between drop-off at 9:30 a.m. and pickup before 1 p.m. Most of that time goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food. Daycare gives her room to complete chores without the baby beside her, not an uncomplicated block of leisure.

Structural Pattern and Significance

The novel connects individual encounters to measurable inequalities without treating statistics as a substitute for lived experience. In 2014, women working in Korea earned 63 percent of men’s earnings, compared with an average of 84 percent across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Korea also received the lowest scores among the countries surveyed in The Economist’s glass-ceiling index. These measures sit alongside the concrete trajectories of women who are excluded from recruitment, denied advancement, or made to leave, and alongside the unpaid work that continues after their paid workday ends.

Across these settings, inequality is sustained by ordinary procedures as much as by openly stated beliefs: who receives the better share, who goes first, who is recommended, who is presumed suited for leadership, and who absorbs the work of care. The novel’s recurring contrast is between formal or public recognition of women’s ambitions and the private and institutional routines that restrict their realization. Its account of gender inequality is therefore cumulative: no single adjustment, achievement, or policy erases the effects of the rules operating elsewhere in women’s lives.