Jiyoung’s discriminatory job search and first job

Kim Jiyoung’s discriminatory job search and first job mark the beginning of her professional life and reveal how gender bias can shape a career before a candidate reaches the workplace. Although she approaches applications with hope, she encounters a labor market where women are underrepresented in hiring, subjected to inappropriate interview questions, and later expected to prove themselves in workplaces that do not plan for them to remain. Her eventual marketing-agency offer opens a door, but it does not remove the barriers that surround it.

Searching for Work

Before applying, Kim Jiyoung remains optimistic about finding work that suits her interests and values, even if it is not at a large corporation. Her friend Yun Hyejin, a year older and better qualified by several conventional measures, is far less hopeful. Hyejin has a higher GPA, a stronger TOEIC score, computer-skills certificates, and a degree in a field employers prefer. She nevertheless doubts that such credentials will secure a job with reliable pay. She points out that the alumni appearing at recruitment events are men, not women.

The imbalance becomes harder for Kim Jiyoung to ignore when she recalls attending job fairs and alumni events throughout her senior year without seeing a female alumnus. In 2005, the year she graduates, women account for 29.6 percent of new employees at 100 companies, a figure presented as a substantial improvement. A separate survey of recruitment managers at fifty large corporations finds that 44 percent would prefer a male candidate when qualifications are equivalent; none say they would prefer a woman. These figures give institutional scale to what had first seemed like Hyejin’s pessimism.

Hyejin also describes an unofficial recruitment channel in which business departments receive requests for candidates through department offices or individual professors, but recommend only male students. The process is difficult to trace: it is not clear whether departments select men on their own or companies specifically request them. One exceptionally accomplished graduate discovers that her department has sent four men for interviews at a company she wanted to join, despite her outstanding academic record and extensive résumé. When she challenges the selection, she receives explanations grounded in presumed employer preference, men’s military service, and their expected role as household heads. The department head’s response treats her objection itself as evidence against her. She eventually enters through open recruitment, but resigns after about six months, finding no women above a certain pay grade and no one who can tell her how long maternity leave lasts. Her boss blames women for not staying; her answer identifies the conditions that make staying difficult. The example clarifies that exclusion is not limited to the moment of hiring.

Rejections and the Interview

When companies begin posting second-half recruitment notices, Kim Jiyoung feels as though she is standing in an alley filled with fog. She wants to work for a food company, but applies to forty-three companies above a certain size and hears back from none. Eighteen smaller, stable companies also reject her without response. Yun Hyejin sometimes advances to an aptitude test or interview but receives no offer either. As their prospects narrow, both women begin applying wherever there is an opening.

Kim Jiyoung passes an application screening for the first time after sending a cover letter that mistakenly names the wrong company. Only after being invited to interview does she investigate the employer: a fast-growing business selling toys, stationery, and household goods featuring caricatures of celebrities. Though she initially feels conflicted about the company’s products, she grows more interested in the position as the interview approaches. The night before, she practices with her sister, sleeps poorly, and wakes tired. On the way to the interview she misses her bus stop after falling asleep, then takes a cab so she will not arrive lost or anxious. The driver’s remark that he normally avoids having a woman as his first customer of the day adds another gendered slight to a morning already dominated by the pressure to perform.

The interview is initially conventional: three young women in similar dark suits and pink lipstick answer questions about their education, résumés, the company, and marketing. Then a male interviewer asks how they would respond if a client behaved in a sexually inappropriate way. Kim Jiyoung tries to choose a middle course, saying she would find a natural reason to leave the room. Another candidate says she would identify the conduct as harassment and demand that it stop; a third suggests checking whether her own appearance or manner had contributed to the behavior. Kim Jiyoung feels chagrined by the last answer even as she disapproves of its logic, recognizing how a biased process can make a candidate weigh self-protection against what might please interviewers.

A few days later she learns that she has not passed. Human resources tells her that the other two candidates failed as well, leaving her to wonder whether she should have responded more forcefully. In private, she gives voice to the anger she suppressed in the interview, condemning both the conduct described in the question and the choice to ask about it during recruitment. The moment does not change the result, but it makes plain the cost of being assessed in a situation where inappropriate behavior is treated as a hypothetical test of the candidate rather than a problem with the client’s conduct.

The Offer and First Work

The rejection is one of many. In later interviews, interviewers comment on Kim Jiyoung’s appearance and clothing, look at her inappropriately, or touch her without need. None leads to a job. As the semester passes and graduation approaches, she considers postponing her degree or pursuing other ways to buy time, but fears that delaying will leave her older and still without work experience. Yun Hyejin studies for the civil-service exam and suggests that Kim Jiyoung join her; Kim Jiyoung hesitates, unsure of the test and wary of spending years preparing without a guarantee of employment.

Her mother urges her to take risks, and later that evening a marketing agency she has interviewed with calls to offer her a job. Fear, self-reproach, and helplessness give way to tears as she hears the news; her boyfriend is especially happy for her. At graduation, he accompanies Kim Jiyoung and her parents. The new job thus arrives not as a confident culmination of a smooth search, but after repeated rejection and a period in which even the choice to keep searching has felt precarious.

At the agency, her first official assignment is a press release based on an environmental assessment of bedding products. She spends several nights on a two-page report because she wants to do well. Her team leader explains that the document should prompt journalists to write articles, rather than read like an article itself, and asks her to revise it. Kim Jiyoung works through the night again; the revised report is released with little change and is picked up by newspapers, a magazine for housewives, and a news network. She likes the work and her colleagues, and gradually stops taking on routine office tasks such as making coffee for everyone or setting the table at lunch. No one objects. The assignment gives her a concrete measure of competence and a successful piece of work, distinct from the biased judgments that shaped her search.

Bias After Hiring

The distance between Kim Jiyoung’s work and her treatment by clients remains. Her agency serves clients who are often older male executives, and their jokes leave her uncertain how to respond: laughing encourages them, while not laughing prompts questions about whether something is wrong. At a business lunch, a client head uses the misogynistic term Doenjangnyeo after she orders soybean paste sauce with rice. The people around the table laugh along with him; Kim Jiyoung and a senior colleague smile awkwardly and change the subject. The episode shows how workplace participation can require women to manage the discomfort created by others while maintaining the client relationship.

Later, when the company forms a planning team intended to develop campaigns and attract clients proactively, Kim Jiyoung tells Kim Eunsil, who is to lead it, that she wants to join. Although Kim Eunsil responds positively, the team is made up of three capable middle managers and the two men hired alongside Kim Jiyoung and Kang Hyesu. The company treats the group as an elite unit. Kim Jiyoung and Kang Hyesu have earned a good reputation, and older colleagues have even joked that the two men had more to learn. Yet the women are left out, and the close friendships among the four new employees grow strained after the men move to the planning team.

A conversation among the colleagues reveals that the company head selected the team with long-term staffing in mind. He assumes the demands of agency work and the prospect of childcare will make female employees less likely to stay, while choosing men for the long project and assigning the women more demanding clients. The decision is not presented as a judgment of the women’s performance; it is a forecast based on gender and presumed future care responsibilities. The company chooses to invest in workers it expects to retain rather than make working conditions more accommodating. Kim Jiyoung’s exclusion therefore echoes the recruitment practices Hyejin described: women’s abilities are measured alongside assumptions about their future availability.

Career and Care Constraints

The same assumptions become material as Kim Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun consider having a child. On a large sheet of paper, they compare returning to work immediately, returning after a year of maternity leave, and not returning. They discuss childcare arrangements, costs, and other advantages and difficulties. If both work, the options are leaving the child with Jung Daehyun’s parents in Busan or hiring a live-in nanny. His parents are willing, but elderly, and his mother has recently had back surgery; a nanny would be costly and would share the household’s daily life. They conclude that one parent will have to stay home, and Kim Jiyoung is the one expected to do so. Jung Daehyun’s job is more stable and pays more, while the established division of labor also makes a husband’s paid employment and a wife’s caregiving seem ordinary.

After the couple’s lease deposit rises by 60 million won, they take out another loan. Kim Jiyoung feels pressure to earn money as housing, living, and education costs rise, but the routes back into employment are uneven. The account notes that more than half of women who leave jobs cannot find new work for over five years; those who return often move into less secure or lower-paid work, including small workplaces, service jobs, and sales. In this way, the first job is both an achievement and an entry into a longer pattern: gendered expectations shape who gets hired, who receives investment and promotion, and who is expected to absorb the costs of care.