Jiyoung is excluded from the planning team

Kim Jiyoung’s exclusion from her company’s planning team turns an apparently ordinary staffing decision into a clear account of gendered career sorting. Although she was interested in helping build a new business direction and had earned a good reputation at work, management reserved the team’s opportunities for male colleagues. The explanation was not that the women lacked ability, but that the company assumed they would not remain long enough to justify investment in them.

The planning team and Jiyoung’s exclusion

The company had reached the limits of its usual model: it pitched for clients, then waited to carry out their requests as hired help. A new planning team would develop advertising campaigns and seek clients proactively. It was conceived as a long-term project that could give the agency a stronger position with clients, a steadier flow of revenue, and room to grow. The prospect interested many people in the office, including Kim Jiyoung, who told Kim Eunsil, the team’s intended leader, that she wanted to join. Eunsil responded positively, but Jiyoung was not selected.

Instead, the company assigned three capable middle-management section managers and the two male colleagues who had joined at the same time as Jiyoung. Management treated the team as an elite group. Jiyoung and Kang Hyesu, the other woman hired alongside her, had also established good reputations, and older colleagues had openly remarked that the two men had initially needed more time to learn the work. The men were not incompetent, but they had been given easier clients. Their subsequent selection therefore sat uneasily beside the women’s demonstrated performance: ability was not the only criterion shaping who received the company’s more promising work.

How management justified the decision

Jiyoung learned the reasoning during a late-night gathering with the four colleagues who had once been close. The company head had personally chosen the planning team. The experienced section managers were included to give the project a strong foundation; the men were chosen because the project was expected to last. Management believed the demands of agency work made a sustainable work–life balance difficult, especially for employees with childcare responsibilities. It therefore did not regard female employees as likely long-term colleagues.

Rather than improve hours or benefits to make the work more sustainable, the company considered it more cost-effective to invest in people expected to endure the existing conditions. That assumption also shaped the women’s assignments: Jiyoung and Kang Hyesu received more demanding clients so that the men thought to have longer careers would not be worn down early. The explanation recast unequal access as practical planning, while making the company’s refusal to adapt its workplace part of the selection logic. Jiyoung’s competence had not secured her a place because management had already treated her anticipated future responsibilities as evidence against her.

The revelation echoed barriers Jiyoung had encountered before entering the workforce. During her university job search, she learned that informal recommendations from business departments could go to male students alone. One highly qualified graduate had been passed over when a company sought candidates, and the reasons relayed to her included preferences for men, military service, and men’s presumed role as household heads. She eventually entered the company through open recruitment, but left after realizing that women did not occupy positions above a certain pay grade and that senior staff could not say how long maternity leave lasted. These episodes show how exclusion could operate at different points: through access to recruitment, advancement, and the conditions that might allow a person to stay.

A rupture among colleagues

Before the decision, Jiyoung, Kang Hyesu, and the two men had been close. Their group chat had buzzed through the workday; they took secret coffee breaks, met for lunch, and went out for drinks. Once the two men moved to the planning team, that routine fell apart. Messages stopped, shared breaks and evenings out ended, and chance meetings in the hall were reduced to awkward nods. The change made the staffing choice visible in the texture of daily relationships: colleagues who had shared an informal sense of belonging now occupied different positions in the office.

Kang Hyesu eventually organized a late-night gathering. The conversation began seriously, with her asking the others not to identify or speculate about the colleague involved in a brief office romance. One of the men then spoke about his younger brother’s difficulty finding work and the burden of student loans. Another admitted that he did not think he belonged on the planning team. As the conversation opened up, Jiyoung discovered how the team had been chosen and what management expected from women. The gathering that restored a space for candor also exposed the assumptions that had divided the group.

Jiyoung also learned that the men had been paid more from the start. By then, the news brought little additional shock; it arrived after the more fundamental discovery that the company had planned around women’s presumed departure. The following morning, she went to work out of habit and handled her assigned tasks as usual. Yet her faith that hard work would lead to opportunity had been weakened. The decision did not immediately remove her from her job, but it altered what the job seemed to offer: competence could win praise without opening the same future available to male colleagues.

Career choices and the cost of care

The planning-team decision gains further significance alongside Jiyoung’s later deliberations about having a child. She worried that she might not be able to sustain both childcare and her career, given that she and Jung Daehyun worked late and on weekends and neither set of parents was positioned to help. Daehyun offered to share practical care, but when Jiyoung asked what he stood to give up, his possible losses—less time with friends, discomfort about working late, and added household duties—seemed far smaller than the youth, health, work, colleagues, social ties, and career plans she felt were at stake.

As the due date approached, the couple set out three possibilities on a large sheet of paper: Jiyoung could return to work immediately, return after a year of maternity leave, or leave work altogether. Continuing to work would mean sending their child to Daehyun’s parents in Busan or hiring a live-in nanny. His parents were elderly, and his mother had recently undergone back surgery; the couple also worried about the cost and intimacy involved in bringing a nanny into their household. They concluded that one parent would have to stay home. Because Daehyun’s job was more stable and paid more, and because it was more customary for wives to care for children, that parent would be Jiyoung. The decision was presented as a practical family choice, but the career costs fell unevenly.

After Jung Jiwon started daycare a little after her first birthday, she adjusted well. Her day ran from a 9:30 a.m. drop-off through a snack, play, and lunch, with pickup before 1 p.m. The roughly three hours Jiyoung gained were mostly taken up by laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food; she barely had time to sit with coffee. The company’s earlier assumption that women’s care responsibilities made them less suitable for long-term investment thus belongs to a broader pattern in Jiyoung’s life: care takes time and limits occupational choices, while workplaces and households alike tend to treat that unequal burden as an expected feature of women’s futures.