Gender Wage Gap

The Gender Wage Gap is the measurable difference between women’s and men’s earnings, but the novel presents it as the outcome of a wider career structure rather than an isolated discrepancy in salary. Its evidence moves from recruitment and workplace assignments to promotion, pay, and the pressures of childcare: women are screened out of some opportunities, treated as less durable employees, and more often expected to absorb the work of care. Kim Jiyoung’s career shows how those connected decisions can restrict both earnings and the possibility of remaining employed.

Definition and Measurement

The clearest national comparison cited in the novel comes from 2014: women working in Korea earned 63 percent of what men earned, while the average across the OECD countries was 84 percent. The account identifies Korea as having the highest gender wage gap among those countries. It also notes that Korea received the lowest score among the countries surveyed in The Economist’s glass-ceiling index, connecting unequal earnings to the broader difficulty women face in reaching senior positions.

These figures describe an outcome, while the surrounding episodes trace some of the routes by which it is produced. The book does not treat an earnings ratio as proof that every woman has the same experience, or explain it through one cause alone. Instead, it places the statistic beside unequal recruitment, different assignments and pay, limited representation at higher grades, and the likelihood that women will be expected to leave work when family care becomes pressing.

Entry into Employment and Access to Opportunity

The job-search experiences recounted by Yun Hyejin show how unequal career paths can begin before a new employee receives a salary. At job fairs and alumni events attended by Kim Jiyoung, she had not seen a female alumnus. Yun Hyejin also describes unofficial recruitment requests that reached business-management departments through their offices or professors. In the instance she knows of, only male students were recommended, while the process was so informal that it was difficult to determine whether the department or the company had initiated the exclusion.

One graduate’s case makes the consequences concrete. She had ranked at the top of her class throughout four years of college and accumulated strong foreign-language results, awards, internships, certificates, and extracurricular experience. Yet when a company sought candidates through the department, four male students were selected for interviews and she was not informed of the opportunity until later. Her complaint brought a series of explanations invoking the company’s apparent preference for men, military service, and men’s presumed future role as household heads. The department head also treated her insistence on an explanation as evidence against her. She eventually obtained a job through open recruitment, but left after roughly six months. Her qualifications had not secured equal access to the initial recommendation channel, and entry into the company did not ensure a lasting career.

Workplace Pay, Assignments, and Advancement

Kim Jiyoung encounters a related pattern after joining a marketing agency. When the company created a planning team intended to develop campaigns and attract clients proactively, she expressed interest and was told she would be well suited to the work. The team nevertheless included three middle managers and the two male colleagues who had started at the same time as her. Kim Jiyoung and Kang Hyesu, the other woman from their hiring group, had established good reputations; colleagues had even observed that the two men had more to learn. Yet the men had been given easier clients while the women handled more demanding ones, and the prestigious new team went to the men.

A later conversation reveals that the selections reflected management’s view of who would remain for the long term, not simply an assessment of capability. The company head believed the job’s demands and poor work–life balance would be hard to combine with childcare, and therefore did not regard female employees as prospective long-term colleagues. Rather than improve hours or benefits, the company invested in employees it expected to endure the existing conditions. The heavier clients assigned to Kim Jiyoung and Kang Hyesu were part of this arrangement: management wanted to develop the male colleagues gradually rather than burden them early. Kim Jiyoung also learns that the men had received higher pay from the outset. The revelation weakens her confidence that effort alone can secure fair treatment, even as she returns to her usual work the next morning.

The graduate’s later experience shows how advancement and retention connect with this pattern. After joining her company, she noticed that there were no women above a certain pay grade. When she asked about maternity leave after seeing a pregnant employee, none of the five people at her table, including a department head, knew how long the leave was because they had never seen an employee take it. She could not imagine herself at the company a decade later and resigned after considering her prospects. The account thus links women’s absence from senior ranks not simply to an abstract lack of ambition but to workplaces where continued employment and advancement appear difficult to reconcile with pregnancy and care.

Care Responsibilities and Career Interruption

The pressure behind that assumption becomes visible in Kim Jiyoung’s discussions with Jung Daehyun about having a child. She worries that childcare and her career may be impossible to combine: both work late and on weekends, and neither set of parents is available to provide regular help. She also feels guilty about considering care by someone else before the child is even born. Jung Daehyun offers to share tasks such as feeding and changing diapers, but when she asks what he would give up, his anticipated losses are mainly less time with friends, earlier returns home, and difficulty attending work dinners or helping with chores. Kim Jiyoung sets those prospective inconveniences against the youth, health, job, colleagues, social ties, career plans, and future she believes she is putting at risk.

As the due date approaches, the couple compares three options on a large sheet of paper: an immediate return to work, a return after a year of maternity leave, or no return. They consider childcare duties, costs, and trade-offs. Sending the child to Jung Daehyun’s parents in Busan is not feasible because they are elderly and his mother has recently had back surgery. A live-in nanny would be costly and would share their household life. They conclude that one parent must stay home. Jung Daehyun’s job is more stable and better paid, and the convention that husbands work while wives raise children reinforces the decision that Kim Jiyoung will leave her job. Her expectation that this outcome is coming does not make it less depressing.

The account also challenges the idea that leaving paid employment means having time free from work. After Jung Jiwon begins daycare a little past twelve months, she adjusts well and spends the morning there before returning home before 1 p.m. The schedule gives Kim Jiyoung approximately three hours without the baby, but laundry, dishes, tidying, and food preparation occupy most of that time. The cited time-use comparison estimates that a stay-at-home mother with a child under two has four hours and ten minutes to herself each day, while a mother whose baby attends daycare has four hours and twenty-five minutes—only fifteen minutes more. Daycare changes whether housework is done with the child beside her, not whether domestic labor disappears. The novel observes that such work is variously dismissed or praised, but rarely assigned a monetary value.

Significance

Across these episodes, the Gender Wage Gap is connected to a sequence of unequal choices and expectations: men are more likely to enter privileged recruitment channels, are selected for work treated as an investment in the future, and may start with higher pay; women’s careers are meanwhile assessed against anticipated childcare and interrupted when family arrangements leave them with fewer workable alternatives. Kim Jiyoung’s experience also shows how unpaid domestic labor continues to consume time after she leaves employment. The figures give the disparity scale, while the linked workplace and household decisions show how it can be sustained: the same care responsibilities that are unevenly assigned at home are used to justify treating women as less reliable investments at work.