Maternity and Parental Leave Rights

Maternity and Parental Leave Rights appear in the novel not as guarantees that automatically secure women’s employment, but as entitlements tested by workplace expectations and the unequal distribution of childcare. Kim Eunsil’s career shows how women can be pressured to prove belonging by returning quickly and accepting burdensome work; her later management reforms try to establish different norms. Kim Jiyoung’s experience then exposes the distance between having leave available and being able to sustain a career while caring for a child.

Workplace Norms and the Cost of Belonging

Kim Eunsil had worked at the company from the time it had only three employees. As the organization grew, the men who had started alongside her advanced into leadership roles at larger firms or started their own businesses, while none of her female colleagues remained in the field. Eunsil had tried to be accepted as one of the men: she stayed until the end of company dinners, volunteered for late work and business trips, and returned to work a month after giving birth. What had once seemed a source of pride came to feel compromised as women around her left. She came to see that the dinners were unnecessary and that recurrent late nights and business travel reflected a staffing problem, not an unavoidable test of commitment.

That retrospective change matters to the novel’s treatment of leave. Employees were entitled to take time away to have and raise children, but Eunsil recognized that her own example had helped create a damaging precedent. A right on paper could coexist with an office culture in which a woman’s commitment was measured by her willingness to work as though she had no care responsibilities. The pressure was not confined to the formal terms of employment: it was reproduced through expectations about availability, socializing, and who would take on inconvenient tasks without being asked.

Eunsil’s Reforms and Their Limits

After becoming a manager, Eunsil acted on what she had learned by ending unnecessary company dinners, retreats, and workshops and guaranteeing both maternity and paternity leave. She took particular pride in welcoming back a team member after a year of maternity leave, presenting her with flowers on the first return of its kind in the company’s history. The gesture marks a change in what the workplace could recognize as normal: a year away for childbirth and care, followed by a return that deserved public welcome rather than suspicion.

The colleague’s subsequent departure, however, reveals the limits of that change. She left a few months after returning because frequent late nights and weekends remained incompatible with childcare. Much of her pay went to a babysitter, yet she still had to scramble to find care at short notice and argued with her husband by phone every day. When she brought her baby to work one weekend, she finally gave up her job. She apologized to Eunsil for quitting, but Eunsil had no answer that could undo the conditions that had made staying so difficult. Leave had enabled a return; it had not restructured the working hours or care arrangements needed to make that return sustainable.

Jiyoung’s Decision About Work and Care

The same tension shapes Kim Jiyoung’s decision as her due date approaches. She weighs taking maternity leave against leaving work altogether, and she and Jung Daehyun lay out three possibilities on a large sheet of paper: an immediate return, a return after a year of leave, or no return. For each, they consider who would care for the child, the cost, and the other advantages and drawbacks. If both continued working, the practical choices appeared to be sending the baby to Daehyun’s parents in Busan or hiring a live-in nanny. His parents were willing, but elderly, and his mother had recently undergone back surgery. The couple was reluctant to bring a nanny into their everyday household, and the expense and uncertain duration of that arrangement added to their concerns.

They conclude that one parent must stay home, and Jiyoung is the one who gives up paid work. Daehyun’s job is more stable and pays more, but the decision is also shaped by the convention that husbands work while wives raise children and manage the home. Jiyoung has anticipated this outcome, yet anticipation does not make it less depressing. The options are discussed together, but their costs are not shared evenly: the interruption falls on the person whose career and future are most directly put at risk by pregnancy and childcare.

Earlier, when Daehyun suggests having a child, he offers to help with diapers, feedings, and washing the baby’s clothes. Jiyoung explains that she fears losing her career and feels guilty even considering care by someone else. When she asks what he would give up, she lists her youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future. His anticipated sacrifices include seeing friends less, coming home earlier, feeling bad about business dinners or late work, and helping with chores after work; he also describes financial support as a major responsibility. Jiyoung finds his possible losses slight beside the disruption she faces. The exchange makes visible why parental leave cannot be understood only as time away from work: it is bound up with whose employment is treated as more secure and whose life is reorganized around care.

Care Work Beyond the Leave Period

After Jiyoung becomes a full-time homemaker, the novel shows that care continues to consume time even when paid employment has stopped. When a doctor recommends resting her wrists, she points out that she still has to care for the baby, wash clothes, and clean. His response minimizes the work because machines have replaced older, more physically demanding methods. Jiyoung’s thoughts counter that assumption: a washing machine does not sort, load, unload, and hang the laundry by itself, and a vacuum does not complete every part of cleaning. Technology changes domestic tasks without eliminating the labor that surrounds them.

The narrative also notes two opposing ways of describing housework: it can be dismissed as idling at home or praised as work that sustains life. Neither description, it observes, calculates its monetary value. That omission connects domestic labor to the limits of leave rights: the work that follows a birth is essential to family life, yet it remains largely outside paid employment and is not made visible simply by granting time away from a job.

Jiyoung’s daughter, Jung Jiwon, starts daycare shortly after turning twelve months old and adjusts well. Her schedule gives Jiyoung about three hours without the child, but most of that time goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food and snacks. Statistics cited in the novel put a stay-at-home mother with a child under two at four hours and ten minutes of personal time a day, compared with four hours and twenty-five minutes for a mother whose child attends daycare. The fifteen-minute difference underscores that daycare does not simply convert a mother’s day into free time; it often allows the same housework to be done without the child beside her. The teacher’s suggestion that Jiwon might nap at daycare and stay later raises the possibility of more time for Jiyoung to begin something new, but it does not erase the labor already filling her day.

Significance

The novel treats maternity and parental leave as necessary rights, while refusing to present them as a complete answer to the pressures surrounding childbirth. Eunsil’s reforms demonstrate that managers can challenge workplace customs and guarantee leave for mothers and fathers. Her colleague’s failed return shows why such guarantees are fragile when late hours, weekend work, costly childcare, and domestic expectations remain unchanged. Jiyoung’s withdrawal from employment makes the unequal consequence stark: when care arrangements do not fit the jobs available, the family’s solution is shaped by income, job stability, and the gendered norm that mothers will stay home.

By placing workplace leave beside household negotiation and the daily accounting of care, the novel distinguishes entitlement from usable support. Time away from paid work matters, but so do the conditions of returning, the availability and cost of childcare, and whether the labor at home is recognized and shared. The rule’s significance lies in this gap: leave can protect a period of care, yet without changes to work and family arrangements it may leave women responsible for absorbing the longer interruption.