Kim Eunsil

Kim Eunsil is a senior colleague and team leader to Kim Jiyoung, one of the few women to advance within the marketing company where they work. Her career embodies both the cost of proving oneself in a male-dominated workplace and the possibility of changing its everyday rules: after years of trying to be accepted on men’s terms, she recognizes the precedent that her own conduct helped establish, and later challenges the company when it fails women harmed by a workplace spycam scandal.

Position and Background

The company Kim Jiyoung joins has about fifty employees and more women than men overall, but men make up a greater proportion nearer management. Kim Eunsil is the only woman among the four team leaders. She has a daughter in elementary school and lives with her mother, who takes care of the household and childcare. Colleagues interpret this arrangement in contradictory ways: some admire Kim Eunsil, while others credit her husband for accommodating his mother-in-law. The narration sets those judgments beside the unremarked labor of women in the home, showing how readily a woman’s career is treated as exceptional while the support that makes it possible is rendered ordinary.

Kim Eunsil has been at the company since it had only three employees. She has watched it and its workforce grow, and she takes pride in having advanced with it. Yet the outcomes for her male and female colleagues diverge: men who were there when she started remain in the profession, often as marketing team leaders elsewhere or as business owners, while none of her female colleagues remain in the field. Her authority therefore rests alongside a clear awareness of how few women have shared its path.

Kim Jiyoung’s First Work and Kim Eunsil’s Intervention

When Kim Jiyoung starts as a new employee, she performs a range of small service tasks: making coffee to suit each team member, setting the table at meals, gathering takeaway orders, and clearing dishes. These duties are not part of her stated work. Her assigned morning task is to review news about the company’s marketing clients, analyze relevant articles, and submit a report. Kim Eunsil calls her in to discuss that work and praises her judgment in selecting articles and the relevance of her analysis. For Kim Jiyoung, the approval is a meaningful first affirmation at her first job.

Kim Eunsil then tells her that she need not make her coffee, arrange her place at meals, or clear her plates. She has observed a pattern over the years: women among new employees take on cumbersome minor tasks without being asked, while men do not, even when they are new or the youngest. Her question about why women assume this work turns a small workplace correction into a recognition of gendered expectations operating through habit rather than formal assignment.

The exchange also recalls Kim Jiyoung’s mother, who lived with her mother-in-law for seventeen years. Although the grandmother watched the youngest child while Kim Jiyoung’s mother made house calls as a hairdresser, she did not take on the children’s routine care or much housework. Kim Jiyoung’s mother cooked, washed clothes, and cleaned, without being praised for the arrangement. Against that history, Kim Eunsil’s refusal to let an unnecessary task pass as a junior woman’s natural responsibility becomes more than personal courtesy: it makes the unequal assignment visible.

Conformity, Recognition, and Reconsideration

Kim Eunsil once tried to secure acceptance as one of the men by staying until the end of company dinners, volunteering for late work and business trips, and returning to work one month after giving birth. At first, she felt proud of her effort. But as female colleagues and women working under her left the company, she began to feel conflicted about what her example had demanded of them. In retrospect, she sees that company dinners were unnecessary and that recurring late nights and business trips were problems to address by hiring enough staff, not tests of individual commitment.

Her change in outlook is not a rejection of her own professional achievement. Rather, she comes to distinguish the work itself from the sacrifices the workplace had treated as proof of belonging. Employees had the right to take leave to have and raise children, but by making herself available on terms shaped around men’s careers, she had helped establish a standard that made that right harder for women to exercise. Her reflection links a personal career strategy to its wider consequence: a woman’s success can be used as evidence that the system is fair, even when other women are leaving it.

Changes as a Manager

After becoming a manager, Kim Eunsil removes unnecessary company dinners, retreats, and workshops, and guarantees both maternity and paternity leave. These changes give practical force to the lesson she has drawn from her earlier career: workplace culture is not fixed, and management can stop treating avoidable demands on employees’ time as customary obligations.

She remembers the company’s first team member to return after a year-long maternity leave. Kim Eunsil welcomed her with a bouquet of flowers and felt proud that the return marked a first for the company. Yet the colleague left a few months later. The episode places the new policy beside its limits: formal leave and a warm welcome matter, but they do not by themselves ensure that a woman can remain in the workplace. Kim Eunsil’s reforms are significant, but the departing employee makes clear that policy change does not instantly undo the conditions that drive women out.

Response to the Spycam Scandal

Later, Kim Eunsil stands with female colleagues after hidden cameras are found in the women’s restroom. A building security agent had installed them, and a male section manager who encountered the images on a pornography site shared them with male colleagues rather than reporting the crime. Kang Hyesu tells Kim Jiyoung that Kim Eunsil and several victims seeking to fight back are getting advice from a women’s organization. Kim Eunsil is also preparing to leave the company and take some female staff with her to start a business of their own.

The company’s male director refuses the victims’ demands for an official apology, preventive measures, and punishment for those responsible. He argues for containing the incident to protect the company’s reputation and invokes the accused men’s families as a reason to avoid consequences. Kim Eunsil rejects that logic: family responsibilities make the offenders’ conduct more, not less, serious, and concealment leaves the company vulnerable to another incident. She also points out that the company has not held the required staff seminars on sexual harassment. Her response identifies both individual complicity in distributing the images and an organizational failure to prevent and address harassment.

Kim Eunsil is frightened and exhausted, as are the victims standing with her, and they want the matter resolved so they can return to their lives. But their risks are not equal: the offenders fear losing some of their privilege, while the women face the possibility of losing far more. Her decision to prepare an exit with female colleagues is thus both a refusal to accept the director’s silence and a measure of how little trust remains in the company’s response. Across her career, Kim Eunsil moves from adapting to unequal expectations to challenging the rules and institutions that reproduce them.