Gender inequality in South Korea

Gender inequality in South Korea emerges in the novel not as a single prohibition but as a chain of ordinary decisions whose costs fall unevenly: male students are favored in recruitment, women’s advancement narrows, and parenthood places their careers and time under pressure. Through Kim Jiyoung’s experience and the psychiatrist’s belated reconsideration of his own assumptions, the narrative connects employment, family bargaining, and unpaid care to show how discrimination can persist even when no single decision is presented as decisive.

Employment and advancement

The account of Kim Jiyoung’s job search reveals an employment system in which formal qualifications do not guarantee equal access. Yun Hyejin explains that business departments sometimes receive unofficial requests for candidates through professors or department offices, but that only male students are recommended. The process is kept out of view, making it difficult to determine whether the department or the company initiated the preference. Its opacity is part of its force: the women excluded from consideration may not even know that an opportunity existed.

One graduate’s experience makes that filtering concrete. She had ranked at the top of her class for four years and assembled strong language scores, awards, internships, certificates, and volunteer and club experience. Yet when a company sought candidates, the department recommended four men. After she challenged the decision, she was offered explanations rooted in assumptions about male preference, military service, and men’s role as future household heads. The department head 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 departure exposed what recruitment statistics alone could not show. She saw no women above a certain pay grade and learned that even a department head did not know the company’s maternity-leave policy. She could not imagine a future there and resigned. Her boss treated her departure as confirmation that women should not be hired; she answered that women left because the company made staying impossible. The episode turns a familiar claim about women’s employment into a question about working conditions, advancement, and whether an institution supports the people it recruits.

The surrounding figures reinforce the contrast between measured improvement and continuing exclusion. In 2005, women made up 29.6 percent of new employees at 100 companies, a result described as a major improvement, while 44 percent of surveyed recruiters at large corporations said they would prefer a male candidate with equivalent qualifications. The share of female employees using maternity leave rose from 20 percent in 2003 to more than half in 2009, but four in ten still worked without taking it. Female managers increased from 10.22 percent in 2006 to 18.37 percent in 2014, still fewer than two in ten. The measures register change, but also show how slowly it reaches the upper levels of employment.

Parenthood as an unequal bargain

When Jung Daehyun suggests having a child, the idea sounds casual to him, but Kim Jiyoung sees a decision with consequences for her body, work, and future. She has little close experience of pregnancy or newborn care and doubts that they can combine two demanding jobs with raising a child. Daycare or a babysitter would not cover their late and weekend work, and their parents could not provide reliable help. Her anxiety is not simply about whether she wants a child; it concerns who will care for that child and what each parent will have to surrender.

Jiyoung names the stakes as her youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future. Daehyun describes having to see friends less often, come home earlier, feel uncomfortable at business dinners or when working late, and help with chores after work. He also points to financial support as a major responsibility. The exchange makes the imbalance legible: both expect their lives to change, but the anticipated changes are not equivalent. Jiyoung’s potential losses reach across nearly every part of her working and personal life, while Daehyun’s account largely concerns adjustments around his existing job.

As the due date approaches, the couple writes out three possibilities: returning to work immediately, returning after a year of maternity leave, or not returning. They consider childcare arrangements, costs, and practical advantages and disadvantages. Sending the baby to Daehyun’s parents in Busan is not feasible because they are elderly and his mother has recently undergone back surgery. A live-in nanny raises concerns about cost, care, and bringing a stranger into the household. They conclude that one parent must stay home, and Jiyoung is the one who does so. Daehyun’s steadier, higher-paying job matters, but the decision also follows the expectation that husbands work while wives raise children and run the home.

The work and time of care

Leaving paid employment does not give Jiyoung unoccupied time. When she reports wrist pain, a doctor dismisses her workload by comparing modern appliances with the heavier domestic labor of the past. Her thoughts expose the difference between operating a washing machine and completing the work around it: laundry still has to be handled, and cleaning still has to be done. Technology may reduce physical effort, but it does not make household tasks perform themselves.

The novel also identifies a broader refusal to measure domestic labor. Housework can be dismissed as idleness or praised as essential work, yet its monetary value is rarely calculated. That omission leaves the labor necessary to sustain family life without an agreed price or visible accounting. Jiyoung’s mother, meanwhile, cannot help her recover from pregnancy because she is working longer hours at her porridge shop after reducing staff to cut costs. She brings leftovers when she can, but the family support Jiyoung might need is constrained by another woman’s paid work and obligations.

When Jung Jiwon starts daycare shortly after turning one, she adapts well and attends from midmorning until before one o’clock. The interval gives Jiyoung approximately three hours, most of which goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food. Statistics cited in the narrative estimate that mothers with children under two have four hours and ten minutes to themselves each day when caring for a child at home, and four hours and twenty-five minutes when the child attends daycare. The fifteen-minute difference underlines that daycare changes where housework happens more than it releases mothers from it. For Jiyoung, the prospect of a longer daycare day nevertheless prompts interest in beginning something new.

That interest meets renewed financial pressure. After the couple’s flat lease expires, the landlord increases the deposit by 60 million won, requiring another loan. Their income makes buying a home difficult, while future kindergarten and after-school costs threaten to make expenses still harder to manage. Jiyoung feels pressure to earn, even as the care responsibilities that interrupted her employment remain in place. The competing demands show how household finances can make paid work necessary without making a return to work straightforward.

The costs carried into families and workplaces

The psychiatrist’s account broadens the pattern beyond Jiyoung’s household. He recognizes that his wife’s medical career has narrowed through successive compromises: from pursuing a university post in ophthalmology, to working as a contract doctor, to giving up her career. With their parents living far away, she managed childcare through a succession of nannies. When their son began school, after-school care and taekwondo arrangements gave her some time to breathe, but a series of behavioral problems at school brought a new crisis. The psychiatrist initially rejected the teacher’s suspicion of ADHD, despite spending little attentive time with the boy. His wife challenged his confidence, and he concedes that her criticism was true.

The school’s recommendation that the boy have a stay-at-home mother leads his wife to stop working. She rises early to prepare breakfast, wash and dress him, take him to school, collect him, arrange art and piano lessons, and sleep in his room. She had arranged a possible return to work with a senior colleague, but later cancels it because the boy is not improving. At year’s end, the psychiatrist comes home late and finds her working through an elementary-school math workbook. The episode makes visible how a child’s needs can be treated as a mother’s responsibility, while the father’s professional routine continues.

The psychiatrist says that, without his wife’s career history, he might have lived without understanding this dimension of women’s lives. His recognition does not make him an outside observer: his earlier inattention, and his assumptions about who should absorb the consequences of childcare, are part of the account. The novel’s closing workplace episode sharpens that point. Lee Suyeon, a counselor at his clinic, resigns after a high-risk pregnancy and earlier miscarriage scares. He privately regards her departure as convenient because she will soon need maternity leave and may need time off for herself or her child. Although he acknowledges that she is an excellent employee, he focuses on lost patients and the clinic’s financial interests, then decides that her replacement should be unmarried. The decision reproduces the very expectation the novel traces: women’s potential care responsibilities are treated as an employment risk, while the workplace’s role in making employment sustainable recedes from view.