Workplace Preference for Hiring and Promoting Men

Workplace Preference for Hiring and Promoting Men describes a pattern in which employers and institutions favor men not because they have demonstrated greater ability, but because they are presumed to be more available for long-term work. In the novel, that presumption shapes recruitment, referrals, pay, assignments, and advancement. Its consequences reach beyond the hiring decision: women may be directed toward less secure career paths, then blamed when an unequal workplace makes it difficult for them to stay.

Recruitment and Unequal Access

The practice first becomes visible to Kim Jiyoung through her job-search study group and her friend Yun Hyejin. Before applying for positions, Kim Jiyoung remains hopeful that a company’s values and the work itself will matter more than its size. Yun Hyejin, who has a higher GPA, a stronger English-language test score, computer certificates, and a degree in a field employers prefer, is already doubtful that even a reliable employer will hire her. She explains that graduates from their college who appear at job fairs and alumni events are men. Kim Jiyoung recalls attending many such events since the beginning of her senior year without seeing a single female alumnus.

The broader figures make that absence consequential. In the year Kim Jiyoung graduated, women accounted for 29.6 percent of new employees at one hundred companies, a figure reported as a substantial improvement. In a separate survey of recruitment managers at fifty large corporations, 44 percent said they would prefer a male candidate when qualifications were equivalent; none said they would prefer a woman. These figures connect the individual experience of searching for work to a hiring environment in which women’s credentials do not reliably translate into equal access.

Access could also be restricted before an open competition began. Yun Hyejin describes unofficial requests for candidates sent through business departments or individual professors. The recommendations were difficult to track, but male students were the ones put forward. One woman learned that her department had selected four men for interviews at a company she wanted to join, despite her exceptional academic record and extensive qualifications. She challenged her adviser and asked for the criteria. The explanations passed up the department hierarchy included the company’s supposed preference for men, compensation for men’s years of military service, and the claim that men would become heads of households. The department head ultimately treated her complaint itself as evidence that she was difficult to deal with. She abandoned the complaint and later obtained a job through open recruitment, but access to that route had not erased the original exclusion.

From Hiring to Advancement

The same assumptions persist after women enter the workplace. The woman who had challenged her department worked at the company for about six months before noticing that there were no women above a certain pay grade. When she asked colleagues, including a department head, about the company’s maternity-leave period, none of the five people at the table knew the answer; none had seen an employee take such leave. She could not imagine a future there and resigned. Her boss interpreted her departure as proof that women should not be hired. Her experience instead showed how an organization can make continued employment difficult and then treat women’s exit as a defect in women rather than a consequence of workplace conditions.

The novel sets these individual experiences beside slow changes in representation. The share of female managers rose from 10.22 percent in 2006 to 18.37 percent in 2014, still fewer than two in ten. Use of maternity leave among female employees also increased, from 20 percent in 2003 to more than half in 2009, although four in ten still worked without taking it. These figures describe partial progress, not an equal career path: statistics about employees who take leave cannot include women who have already left because of marriage, pregnancy, or childbirth.

Project Selection and Unequal Work

At Kim Jiyoung’s marketing agency, the preference takes the form of decisions about who is considered worth investing in for the long term. The company is developing a planning team to move beyond responding to clients’ requests and toward creating campaigns and attracting clients of its own. Kim Jiyoung is interested, and Kim Eunsil, who will lead the team, tells her she would be suited to it. The eventual selections include three competent middle managers and two men who joined at the same time as Kim Jiyoung. Kim Jiyoung and her female colleague Kang Hyesu, both of whom had built good reputations, are left out. The men had handled easier clients, yet the company treats them as members of an elite, long-term project.

A conversation among the colleagues reveals that this division is deliberate. The company head selected the team, viewing the demanding agency schedule and its poor work–life balance as incompatible with childcare. He therefore did not imagine female employees as future long-term colleagues and did not intend to make the working environment more accommodating. Rather than improve hours or benefits, management chose to invest in employees it expected to remain. That logic also explains why Kim Jiyoung and Kang Hyesu had been given the more difficult clients: the aim was to avoid tiring out the men regarded as future assets. The two men were paid better from the beginning as well. The difference in treatment was not presented as a response to the women’s competence; it followed from an institutional forecast about who would stay.

Career Interruption and the Rule’s Consequences

The novel links workplace expectations to the pressures surrounding care without suggesting that every employer makes the same decision. As Kim Jiyoung’s due date approaches, she and her husband Jung Daehyun compare returning to work immediately, returning after a year of leave, and not returning. They discuss the cost and responsibility of childcare. Sending their 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 expensive and would share the family’s daily life. They conclude that one parent must stay home, and Kim Jiyoung is the one who leaves her job, in part because Jung Daehyun’s work is more stable and pays more, and in part because the arrangement is socially familiar.

Later, the pressure to earn money does not restore the career she left. After the couple’s landlord raises the flat’s rental deposit by 60 million won, they take another loan. Kim Jiyoung knows mothers who return to work through freelancing, tutoring, service work, or part-time jobs. The novel notes that more than half of women who leave their jobs cannot find new work for over five years, and that those who do return often move into smaller workplaces, lower-paid work, or sectors such as hotels, restaurants, and sales. The pattern turns anticipated care responsibilities into a career penalty: women are treated as less promising before they have children, and their interrupted employment later narrows the work available to them.

Narrative Significance

By moving from recruitment stories to an agency’s project assignments and then to the practical costs of childcare, the novel presents male preference as more than a single prejudiced hiring decision. It operates through informal recommendations, assumptions about future family roles, unequal access to prestigious work, and the absence of workplace arrangements that would support care. Women’s departure can then be invoked to justify the original assumption that they were not dependable long-term employees. The recurring cycle is the rule’s central consequence: unequal opportunity helps produce unequal outcomes, while those outcomes are used to make the inequality appear reasonable.