Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development functions in the novel as an international point of comparison for the gendered inequalities shaping working life in Korea. Its wage figures place an individual employee’s experience within a broader pattern: women’s lower pay and restricted prospects appear not as isolated workplace disappointments but as measurable features of the labor market.

Role in the Account

The organization enters the narrative through employment statistics rather than through a depiction of its internal structure or activities. The cited 2014 data gives the novel a common comparative measure, allowing it to set South Korean women’s earnings against both men’s earnings in Korea and the OECD average. The organization’s significance here is therefore evidentiary: its comparison helps frame the scale of the disparity the narrative describes.

The Wage Comparison

The novel reports that women working in Korea earned 63 percent of what men earned in 2014, while the OECD average was 84 percent. It identifies Korea as having the largest gender wage gap among OECD countries. These figures make the comparison stark: the disparity is not merely a difference between individual salaries, but a national outcome that stands out against the organization’s cross-country benchmark.

Workplace Inequality in Context

The wage figures accompany scenes in which career opportunities and pay are shaped by assumptions about gender and future care responsibilities. At Kim Jiyoung’s marketing agency, two male colleagues were selected for a long-term planning team and were paid more from the outset; management had treated women as less likely to remain in demanding work once childcare entered the picture. The OECD comparison does not explain or cause these decisions, but it gives the novel’s account of such workplace practices a wider economic context.

Scope of the Evidence

The evidence presents the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as a source and comparator for wage-gap data, not as a participant in the events or as a subject of institutional description. Its role remains deliberately bounded: the statistic quantifies one dimension of inequality, while the surrounding narrative shows how unequal opportunities, pay, and care expectations take shape in people’s working lives.