Gender discrimination in employment in South Korea

Gender discrimination in employment in South Korea is presented not as a single barrier but as a sequence of connected decisions: women are overlooked in recruitment, denied access to career-building work, and treated as less durable employees because they may become mothers. The result reaches beyond hiring. It affects pay, promotion, the division of difficult assignments, and whether women can imagine remaining in a job. Kim Jiyoung’s experiences and the accounts she hears expose how these outcomes can be produced through ordinary workplace expectations rather than one conspicuous act of exclusion.

Recruitment and the First Career Barrier

Before applying for jobs, Kim Jiyoung remains hopeful that she can find an employer whose work and outlook suit her, even if it is not a large company. Her study-group friend Yun Hyejin is less optimistic. Although Hyejin has stronger grades, a better TOEIC score, computer certificates, and a degree in a field employers favor, she doubts that those qualifications will be enough. She points to the absence of women among the alumni representing their college at job fairs. Jiyoung recalls attending such events since the start of her senior year without seeing a female alumnus, and recognizes that her own optimism had rested on an incomplete view of who gets recruited.

Figures from 2005 give that observation a wider context: women made up 29.6 percent of new employees at 100 companies, a result reported as a major improvement. In a separate survey of recruiting managers at fifty large corporations, 44 percent said they would prefer a male candidate when qualifications were equivalent; none said they would prefer a woman. The narrative connects those broad figures to informal recruitment practices described by Hyejin. Business departments might receive requests for recommended candidates through professors or department offices, yet men alone were sometimes put forward. Because the process was kept out of view, it was difficult to determine whether departments were choosing men on their own or companies were specifically requesting them. Its opacity made exclusion harder to challenge as well as harder to document.

Hyejin recounts the case of a woman who had ranked at the top of her class throughout four years of college and assembled an impressive record of language scores, awards, internships, certificates, clubs, and volunteer work. She learned only after the fact that her department had recommended four men for interviews at a company she hoped to join. When she asked her adviser for the selection criteria and threatened to make the matter public unless she received a legitimate explanation, the justifications that came down through the department hierarchy invoked the company’s apparent preference for men, men’s compulsory military service, and their expected role as household heads. The department head’s response turned her reasonable demand for an explanation into evidence against her, portraying a capable woman who challenged the decision as troublesome. She eventually entered the company through open recruitment, but left after about six months.

Promotion, Pay, and the Organization of Work

The graduate’s short tenure reveals that obtaining a job does not resolve the question of whether a woman can build a future there. She noticed that there were no women above a certain pay grade. When she asked colleagues, including a department head, how long maternity leave lasted after seeing a pregnant employee in the dining hall, none knew: they had never seen an employee take it. Unable to picture herself at the company a decade later, she resigned. Her manager treated her departure as proof that women were not worth hiring; she answered that women left because the company made it impossible for them to stay. The exchange identifies a self-reinforcing logic: an organization’s conditions drive women out, then their absence is used to justify excluding women in the first place.

A similar logic shapes the planning team at Kim Jiyoung’s marketing agency. The team is intended to move the company beyond passively fulfilling clients’ requests by developing campaigns and attracting clients of its own. Jiyoung expresses interest, and Kim Eunsil responds positively, but the team is staffed by three capable section managers and the two male employees who started at the same time as Jiyoung. Jiyoung and her female colleague Kang Hyesu feel passed over despite their strong workplace reputations. Older staff had even joked that the two men had a steeper learning curve than their female counterparts, while the men were given easier clients.

A later conversation reveals that the planning appointments were not simply a judgment of individual performance. The company head regarded the new team as a long-term investment and assumed that the demanding nature of agency work would make it difficult for women to remain once they had children. He therefore selected the men as more likely long-term employees, rather than improving hours or benefits so that employees could stay. The more difficult clients went to Jiyoung and Hyesu because management wanted to avoid wearing down the men it expected to retain. The two men were also paid better from the beginning. These decisions turn assumptions about future care responsibilities into present differences in opportunity, workload, and compensation; continued effort alone cannot correct a process designed around unequal expectations.

Kim Eunsil’s career offers a contrasting account of how workplace practices can be changed. Having joined her company when it had only three employees, she had taken on late nights, business trips, and company dinners in an effort to be accepted as one of the men. She returned to work a month after giving birth and initially felt proud of that record. But as female colleagues and employees under her left, she came to feel that her example had helped set an unfair standard. After becoming a manager, she removed unnecessary dinners, retreats, and workshops and guaranteed maternity and paternity leave. She especially valued welcoming back a team member after a year of maternity leave, the first such return in the company’s history. Her account distinguishes women’s ability to endure a workplace from the workplace’s responsibility to make continued employment possible.

Childcare and the Career Penalty

For Kim Jiyoung, the prospect of returning to work becomes a practical family decision under unequal conditions. As her due date approaches, she and Jung Daehyun write three possibilities on a large sheet of paper: an immediate return, a return after a year of maternity leave, or no return. They compare childcare arrangements, costs, and advantages and disadvantages. If both remain employed, the options are to send the child to Daehyun’s parents in Busan or hire a live-in nanny. His parents are willing to help, but are elderly, and his mother has recently had back surgery. The couple is also reluctant to bring a nanny into their everyday family life, and the cost and duration of that arrangement remain concerns. They conclude that one parent must stay home. Jiyoung is the one who leaves work: Daehyun’s job is more stable and better paid, and the surrounding convention also favors husbands’ employment and wives’ responsibility for children and the home.

That choice is framed by material pressures as well as custom. After the lease on their flat expires, the landlord raises the deposit by 60 million won, forcing the couple to borrow again. They cannot afford to buy a home for three on Daehyun’s income alone, while a mortgage and the future costs of kindergarten and after-school programs add to the strain. Jiyoung feels pressure to earn money, but the conditions that would allow her to return are difficult to secure. The narrative describes a common post-childbirth pattern: some women freelance or enter private education, while many take part-time work in shops, restaurants, telemarketing, or service jobs. Reports cited in the book indicate that more than half of women who leave jobs cannot find new work for over five years. Those who do return commonly move into less skilled, lower-paid work; the share employed by very small workplaces doubles, and women become less likely to hold manufacturing or office jobs and more likely to work in hotels, restaurants, and sales.

The costs of care also remain obscured inside the household. When Kim Jiyoung seeks medical help for her wrists, she explains that she cannot rest because she must care for the baby, wash clothes, and clean. The doctor dismisses the burden on the grounds that modern appliances have made housework easier. Jiyoung’s response, though unspoken, distinguishes machines from the work they do not perform: laundry still has to be handled, and cleaning still requires labor. The narrative observes that domestic work may be dismissed as idleness or praised as life-sustaining, while its monetary value is rarely calculated. Neither description changes who is expected to do it. Her mother cannot provide regular recovery help because she must work longer hours at the porridge shop, whose business has declined; she brings Jiyoung leftovers when she can.

Recognition and the Narrative’s Wider Frame

Even daycare does not create an uncomplicated return to paid work. Statistics cited in the narrative give mothers with children under two an average of four hours and ten minutes to themselves at home, compared with four hours and twenty-five minutes for mothers whose children attend daycare. The small difference suggests that care arrangements shift when housework is done more than they free mothers from it. For Jiyoung, the possibility of picking up her daughter later after lunch sparks interest in beginning something new, but that opening exists alongside housing costs and the difficulty of finding suitable work after a career break. Mothers who work are also criticized for leaving children in daycare for leisure, even though many instead return to low-paid jobs to meet household expenses.

The book extends this account through the psychiatrist treating Jiyoung. In 2016, he records that her symptoms have become less frequent but have not disappeared, and that he has prescribed medication for depression and insomnia. He initially understands her condition as postnatal depression that developed into childcare-related depression, but as treatment continues he begins to question the haste of that diagnosis. He recognizes that the memories she recounts calmly and clearly have made him aware of a world he had not previously understood. His recognition is shaped by his wife’s medical career: despite being a better student than he was, she moved from seeking an academic position in ophthalmology to contract work and ultimately gave up her career. Her experience, and the compromises he witnesses, make visible to him how childbirth and childcare reshape women’s professional lives.

His changing perspective does not make him an uncomplicated authority. The account of his own family shows that he has spent little time with his son while his wife manages the daily care, and that he initially resists a teacher’s suggestion that the boy may have ADHD. His wife challenges the confidence of his judgment by pointing out that he scarcely observes the child. When she suspends her medical work to care for their son, she takes on the school routine and the arrangements for lessons and care. The narrative places this domestic division beside Jiyoung’s experience to show how assumptions about women’s availability at work and responsibility at home reinforce one another. Employment discrimination thus extends beyond the office: it is sustained by the unequal allocation of care, while women’s departures are too often treated as personal choices rather than outcomes shaped by workplaces and families.