Gender Pay Gap in South Korea

Gender Pay Gap in South Korea is more than a difference in salaries: the novel traces how unequal recruitment, promotion, pay, and expectations about care shape women’s working lives. It sets a national pay comparison beside the everyday decisions that narrow women’s opportunities, from covertly favoring male job candidates to directing demanding work toward women deemed less likely to remain. Parenthood then intensifies the imbalance, as the costs of childcare and household labor fall disproportionately on women.

Measurement and Context

In the novel’s account, women working in South Korea earned 63 percent of what men earned in 2014, while the average across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was 84 percent. The same passage notes that South Korea received the lowest scores among the countries surveyed on The Economist’s glass-ceiling index, a measure of barriers facing women at work. Together, the figures position the wage disparity within a wider pattern of limited advancement, rather than treating pay as an isolated outcome.

The imbalance is also visible at the point of entry into employment. A 2005 survey cited in the narrative found that women made up 29.6 percent of new employees at 100 companies, a proportion described at the time as a substantial 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; none preferred women. These figures give scale to what Kim Jiyoung encounters in her own search for work and what Yun Hyejin explains about recruitment practices.

Recruitment and Unequal Access

Yun Hyejin tells Kim Jiyoung that business management departments sometimes receive informal requests from companies for candidate recommendations, either through the department office or individual professors. The process is sufficiently concealed that it can be difficult to determine whether departments recommend only men or companies explicitly request them. Either way, an apparently ordinary route into employment can keep qualified women outside the candidate pool before a formal hiring process begins.

Hyejin recounts the case of a woman who had ranked at the top of her class for all four years and assembled strong language scores, awards, internships, certificates, and extracurricular experience. When a company sought candidates through her department, four men were selected for interviews, and she learned of the decision only through a male student who had not passed the interview. She challenged her adviser and sought the criteria for the recommendation. As her complaint moved up to the department head, she was given explanations that invoked the company’s apparent preference for men, men’s military service, and their presumed future status as household heads. The department head also treated her insistence on an explanation as evidence that smart women were difficult to deal with.

The graduate eventually stopped pursuing the complaint and obtained a job through the company’s open recruitment later that year. But entry did not secure a lasting place. After roughly six months, she noticed that no women worked above a certain pay grade. When she asked colleagues, including a department head, how long maternity leave lasted, none of the five knew: none had seen an employee take it. Unable to imagine herself remaining at the company ten years later, she resigned. Her boss blamed the departure on hiring women; she responded that women left because the company made it impossible for them to stay. The episode links access to employment with the separate question of whether a workplace makes advancement and continued employment viable.

Promotion, Pay, and Retention

Kim Jiyoung’s experience at a marketing agency shows how assumptions about future care responsibilities can shape assignments and promotion before a woman becomes a parent. When the company formed a planning team to develop campaigns and recruit clients, Jiyoung expressed interest and was told she would be good at the work. The team nevertheless consisted of three competent middle managers and the two men who had started alongside her. Jiyoung and her female colleague, Kang Hyesu, had built good reputations; older staff even joked that the two men had faced a steeper learning curve. Yet the men were assigned easier clients, while the women handled more demanding ones.

A late-night conversation with colleagues revealed the management logic behind the selection. The company head regarded the planning team as a long-term project and chose the men on the assumption that women would not be suitable long-term colleagues in a job with difficult hours, especially if childcare became part of their lives. Management did not intend to improve hours or benefits to make the work more sustainable; it preferred to invest in employees thought likely to endure the existing conditions. Jiyoung and Hyesu had been given demanding clients not because management doubted their competence, but because it sought to protect the men it expected to retain. The planning team thus offered advancement while gendered expectations determined who was considered a sound investment for it.

Jiyoung also learns that the men had been paid better from the beginning. That discovery comes after she has already absorbed the exclusions from recruitment and the planning team, and it further weakens her confidence that hard work alone will bring a fair outcome. She continues to perform her assigned tasks the next morning, almost by habit, but her drive and faith in the workplace have diminished. The disparity in pay is therefore presented alongside unequal access to the assignments and career paths that can sustain or increase earnings.

Parenthood and Career Interruption

Before having a child, Jiyoung identifies the unequal stakes more clearly than her husband, Jung Daehyun. She worries that she may not be able to maintain both a career and childcare: both spouses work late and on weekends, and their parents cannot readily take on care. Daycare or a babysitter would not, by itself, resolve the difficulty. When Daehyun offers to help with diapers, feeding, and washing baby clothes, Jiyoung asks what he would have to give up. She names her youth, health, job, colleagues, social connections, career plans, and future as things placed at risk. Daehyun anticipates seeing friends less, coming home earlier, feeling constrained by work dinners and late hours, and carrying financial responsibility. In her view, those losses are not comparable to the potential disruption of her own life.

As the due date approaches, the couple lays out three possibilities on a large sheet of paper: returning to work immediately, returning after a year of maternity leave, or not returning. For each, they consider who would care for the child, the cost, and the advantages and disadvantages. If both continued working, the options were sending the baby to Daehyun’s parents in Busan or hiring a live-in nanny. His parents were willing to help but elderly, and his mother had recently undergone back surgery. A live-in nanny would be costly and would share the household’s daily life, not merely provide childcare. After considering these constraints, they conclude that one parent must stay home. Daehyun’s job is more stable and better paid, while the customary division of work makes it more usual for husbands to earn and wives to care for children and run the home; Jiyoung becomes the stay-at-home parent. Knowing this outcome was likely does not make her feel less depressed.

The novel also shows how domestic work remains substantial even after childcare is partly outsourced. When Jung Jiwon begins daycare shortly after turning twelve months old, she adapts well. Her schedule runs from a 9:30 a.m. drop-off through a snack, play, and lunch, with return home before 1 p.m. This gives Jiyoung about three hours without the baby, but most of that time goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food. She has scarcely a moment to sit down with coffee. The narrative compares this situation with statistics reporting only a fifteen-minute difference in daily free time between stay-at-home mothers with children under two and mothers who send a baby to daycare: 4 hours and 10 minutes against 4 hours and 25 minutes. Daycare changes whether housework is done with the child beside the mother, not whether that work disappears.

Domestic Labor and the Limits of Recognition

Jiyoung’s treatment by a doctor makes the undervaluation of housework explicit. When she says that she cannot rest her wrists because she must care for the baby, wash clothes, and clean, the doctor dismisses the complaint by comparing contemporary appliances with the physical effort women once expended on laundry and cleaning. The narrative counters the comparison by drawing attention to the work machines do not perform: someone still has to load and hang clothes, prepare the home for cleaning, and wash and dry the cleaning cloths. Technology can reduce physical effort without eliminating domestic labor.

The passage sets that unseen work beside technological change in other fields. No one would argue that office workers or farmers have nothing to complain about simply because computers or machinery have made some tasks easier; domestic labor, by contrast, is often treated either as idleness or as life-sustaining work, without its monetary value being calculated. The novel suggests that this failure to count the work helps obscure the economic consequences of assigning it primarily to women. When women leave paid employment or lose time for career development to sustain a household, the wage gap belongs not only to the office but also to the arrangements that make continued work possible for some and harder for others.