by Hanna Rosin
“Just the fact that they were asking me those questions tipped me off that there would be limitations,” she said. “At a Korean firm there is so much hierarchy. I would have to start out copying documents. I went to a very good school. I can do better than copying documents.” At a foreign firm, an entry-level executive might be in the same meeting with the CEO, or working on teams with much more senior executives—a configuration unheard of at a Korean company.
Yongah took a job at McKinsey Consulting and has been there over a decade. She is married now, and has a son, She starts her day at eight or nine and leaves around eight, which is still long but reasonable by Korean standards. She feels free to skip out on some after-work drinking sessions and instead invite certain clients to lunch or tea, or send them a book. She finds that some of them actually appreciate these alternatives, which give them a few evening hours to themselves. Now, when she talks about her work/life juggling, she sounds like any ambitious American woman, stressed out but not desperate. “It’s up and down. If I have to go to my son’s school to meet a teacher I can leave at four and finish my work in the evening, or do a conference call from home. If it’s an unavoidable family event I try to make it. But at the same time I don’t want to jeopardize my professional life. In each case it comes down to my own personal judgment.”
A research team at Harvard Business School led by economist Jordan Siegel noticed that in the last several years, foreign firms not just in Korea but in many industrial and emerging economies in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe have begun to hire large numbers of local woman executives. After looking at Korean examples more closely, Siegel figured out why. The sudden interest in women executives was not driven by a sense of justice or equity, but by a keen eye for a new kind of competitive edge. Every year these countries are churning out female graduates from colleges and professional schools, but relatively few of them find jobs. In Korea, for example, only 60 percent of college-educated women work, the lowest rate in any OECD country. And once they do find a job at a local firm, they have trouble climbing the corporate ladder.
Foreign firms have begun to take advantage of this disparity, hiring the most qualified female executives at lower salaries, and hanging on to them with more humane work policies. Why are they only doing this now? Fifteen years ago, the consequences of hiring women would have been too damaging. Local clients would have been resistant to doing business with a woman. Their sexism and condescension are typified by the response one Korean financial executive gave Siegel when asked about his own hiring practices (and this is the mildest insult in the report): “I have no female managers. . . . I found that women are limited by emotional decision-making and that it causes problems.” These attitudes haven’t disappeared, but they have softened just enough that foreign firms in Korea can get away with hiring a few more women. The world, in other words, is at a transition point, grudgingly aware that women are poised to be powerful but not quite ready to accept it. For the companies who take the risk, by Siegel’s analysis, it pays off. Siegel found that increasing female managers makes a firm more profitable over time. More specifically, increasing female managers by 10 percent raises profitability by one percent, partly because they pay women less, and partly because the firms hiring more women are more nimble and responsive to trends, Siegel guesses.
When Yongah took her first job at an American investment bank in the bank’s Seoul office around 1997, women were still a rarity in boardrooms and clients did not know how to treat her. She would hold out her hand and no one would shake it. Male executives would not look her in the eye. Most assumed she was the secretary or the translator. She heard stories of clients who absolutely refused to work with teams that included a woman. Now fifteen years later, clients have gotten used to her; in fact, after years of excellent work they have begun requesting her—if nothing else, a woman on a team is memorable. Last year, a few Korean companies asked her to give talks at their firm on how they can recruit and retain female workers. Lately, clients have started asking Yongah how their daughters can grow up to be more successful like her. In Korean universities, women now make up about half of all business majors and last year McKinsey was flooded with impressive female applicants. “Women have the drive and the persistence to excel,” says Yongah. “It’s just that so many things get in their way.”
Here and there, Korean business leaders, like business leaders all over the world, are slowly starting to loosen up. In my visits to many Korean companies, Yuhan-Kimberly, a paper goods and pharmaceutical company, stood out from the minute my translator and I walked into the waiting room. The office could have been in Silicon Valley: no cubicles, only tables and cushy chairs in friendly Ikea colors. A man met us and offered us tea and water while we waited for his boss, who was a woman. Yuhan-Kimberly was named one of Korea’s Most Admired Companies in 2011 for its humane workplace policies and corporate ethics. Although it’s a joint venture with a British company, many of the innovations originated with Moon Kook-Hyun, the former CEO and failed presidential candidate from the Creative Korea party. Executives at Yuhan work eight- or nine-hour days and can choose flexible schedules, working from seven to four for example. At seven thirty, the company turns off the lights to force any remaining employees to go home. New mothers are encouraged to take a full six months of maternity leave. You might even argue that the company goes too far in its sensitivity to women, isolating pregnant women in a corner with a special ergonomically designed chair and desk, and reserving for them a resting lounge that calls up a Victorian fainting couch.
When economists assess a country’s future, they see this ambivalence over women’s role as the critical factor blocking its progress. Korea thrived so quickly under an era of severe discipline and rigid hierarchy. But now, decades in, those same qualities are stalling the country. In order to move forward, South Koreans need to create a more nimble economy, focused on innovation, design, knowledge, and service. They need to prove to the world that they have joined the twenty-first century. And a large part of that transformation involves empowering women workers, who are now kept just below middle management and behind the scenes. As executives at companies such as Kia (which is owned by Hyundai) try to expand their share of the global market, they face what in part amounts to an image problem: Sending a solid block of middle-aged men in suits as the company’s ambassadors to France or Canada, say, does not convey cool car of the future. It conveys that the company is stuck in another era.
The more Korea wants to be part of the global culture, the more the country’s leaders will have to bend—if not out of a sense of fairness and justice than out of a desire to succeed. In 2000, Korea set its heart on hosting the Winter Olympics. This would have been a major coup because until that point hosting the Games had generally been the province of northern Europe or the United States, and implied being rich enough that a significant portion of your population enjoyed expensive leisure activities and patronized luxury resorts. The Korean emissaries tried for a decade to win over the International Olympic Committee, without much luck. After evaluating past bids and polling international members they finally figured out why: The Korean team was stocked with senior businessmen who spoke very little English and could not really mingle at the networking parties. They needed to present a more “modern face of Korea,” to look “more approachable.”
Actually what they said to Theresa Rah, the TV anchor they finally chose to be their communications director, was, “we need a woman,” she told me when we met in a Seoul coffee shop. Raised by a diplomat father and fluent in Korean, English, and French, Rah was drafted as the face of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Games Bid Committee. At the final meeting, she gave a public presentation that won over committee members and made her an instant celebrity in Korea, the symbol of the “perfect working woman,” as one Korean newspaper put it. Youthful and utterly charming, Rah gave a speech that could have just as easily served as a plea to Korea’s leaders on behalf of the nation’s women. The committee
should give “people with desire and talent the tools they need to succeed,” she urged them. “This is a race about dreams, about recognizing human potential.” At one of the press conferences announcing that Korea had beaten out France and Germany for the Winter Games, a young woman showed up dressed in the Korean national costume and insisted on shaking hands with Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee. She was a university student now but “in the future I want to be president of the IOC,” the girl told him.
Women such as Yongah Kim at McKinsey or Theresa Rah remain a rare, privileged breed in Korea. They are buffeted by impressive foreign diplomas and worldly diplomat friends, and fluency in several languages. If they get truly frustrated, they can escape to Switzerland or California. But for the average Korean woman—as for the average woman in most recently industrialized countries—appearing too cosmopolitan, or cosmopolitan in the wrong ways, can backfire. Perhaps the most insulting of the expressions for the new breed of power woman used regularly by the Korean press is “soybean paste” girl. The label implies that she eats soybean paste stew for her meals because it’s cheap and she wants to save the rest of her money to buy foreign luxury products—a Louis Vuitton bag, Chanel sunglasses, and a six-dollar Starbucks coffee to go with her one-dollar stew. In other words, as a consumer she is a national traitor.
In a wonderful unpublished paper, University of Chicago graduate student Vivien Chung compared the soybean paste girl with her vaunted counterpart, the fashionista. In the Korean media, the former is portrayed as an embarrassing mimic of other people’s styles. She wears whatever she sees on Sex and the City or Gossip Girl and carries around English magazines that she can’t really understand. The latter—the fashionista—is a true artist, the ideal modern Korean woman who creates a personal style that’s locally inspired. In the fashionista, Koreans see a nation that can hold its own with France or the United States, a nation whose cultural prestige genuinely matches its economic power. In the soybean paste girl, Koreans see what they fear they have become—an arriviste nation, with economic power but no panache or respect, a mimic of other nations’ modernity.
In her paper, Chung quotes from a series of popular stories that imagine a romance between soybean paste girl and hot pepper paste man. He is a hardworking student fresh out of the military and preparing for his grueling national exams. He does not have much money, so he eats a frugal lunch and drinks water. Along comes a pretty soybean paste girl, who convinces him to buy her a fancy meal and a Starbucks coffee. He blows all his remaining money on a single meal. In the parable, hot pepper paste man is the old, noble Korea and she is the shallow temptress leading the nation down a dangerous path.
It’s easy to recognize the soybean paste girl on the streets of Seoul—a young woman in sunglasses with a designer bag on line at Starbucks. But in my experience she was not usually nursing her cappuccino, or madly texting her friends about which mall they would meet at next. What seemed most off to me about the stereotype was the impression that she was in any way frivolous—crass and commercial, maybe, but not a woman with endless time on her hands. Initially I had written a few contacts saying I wanted to “hang out” with some young Korean women and maybe go shopping with them. I got this idea from reading about what was known a few years ago as the new class of “parasite girls” in Japan—young super-shoppers who idled all day at department stores, changing their look every two weeks and living off their parents. But then one of my contacts corrected me: “I know plenty of women here who shop,” she said. “But I can’t think of a single Korean friend who ‘hangs out.’ That’s just not something they do.” Instead they are generally rushing somewhere, to study or to work.
The real danger to hot pepper paste man these days is not soybean girl; it’s something like her opposite: a woman who doesn’t tempt him away from his exams because she is so busy studying herself, a woman who a few years later has no need of his money to buy her lunch or a fancy designer bag, because she is making enough money to buy them for herself. Asia’s looming problem right now is not the dangers of seduction but the threat of industrial-scale sexual indifference. In a host of Asian countries, including Korea, the new woman and the same old man have looked each other over and each has deemed the other a wholly unsuitable life partner, creating a region of “lonely hearts,” as The Economist recently called them. Japan, a few years down the road in this phenomenon, is now into comic territory. Sixty-one percent of single Japanese men between ages eighteen to thirty-four said in a government survey they have no girlfriend, and nearly half said they did not want one. The travel industry has begun to adjust honeymoon resorts to accommodate single-sex groups. The men often show up with a handheld device containing a virtual girlfriend who is a customized digital being, or with a body-length pillow on which is painted a picture of a woman.
Stephanie Kim and Kirsten Lee have been friends since they went to college together in Seoul. I met Stephanie through a friend and she brought along Kirsten because she was a typical “Gold Miss,” Stephanie informed me: thirty-four, successful, and decisively single. We met in a slouchy tea house that doubled as a theater and served Korean takes on American vegan (tofu cheesecake, for example). They were both consciously stylish but in no way unserious; Kirsten carried all her work papers in a backpack, not a designer bag. She works as a producer of soap operas for the main Korean television station; you could say both had sacrificed domestic stability for independence and work satisfaction.
Kirsten has had the same boyfriend for three years. They don’t live together, because very few couples in Korea do. Theoretically she would like to get married one day, but in fact she does nothing to encourage it. Her life right now is “perfect,” she told me. “I make good money and I do whatever I want.” Whatever she wants means working from seven A.M. to midnight most days on the set, but that’s fine by her. She’s already told her boyfriend that she’ll never stop working, not even when she has a child, although a child at this point is just a word she throws out, nothing close to a concrete possibility.
Kirsten knows what the culture makes of hardworking mothers because she casts them in her soap operas all the time. A recent series features a working mother who is always frantically fielding calls from her autistic son’s school. But the audience reaction to her was so hostile that they had to make the woman quit her job. That experience in her professional life only made Kirsten dig in deeper in her personal one. “I really don’t see any reason to get married. If I do get married, I’ll just have to do all the work. All my married friends complain about life, so my only conclusion is, there’s no better life after marriage, only worse.”
“They complain?” asks Stephanie, and she is joking, since her own story may be the cautionary tale most responsible for keeping Kirsten single. A few years ago Stephanie married someone she thought was the “new Korean man,” a cool fashion photographer who seemed like he understood what she wanted. Now, she summarizes her decision as: “I was totally deceived.” As soon as they got married he reverted to old Korea, she says. He would not do any housework or cooking; he just went to his room to work. When she went away on work trips three times a year, he shipped their son to her parents. “I was doing everything myself. I was the breadwinner and the housekeeper, and it seemed pointless to stay married,” she says, and they divorced. “I feel like I fired him.”
“Our generation was educated to compete with men. We go to equally good schools and get equally good jobs and have careers almost the same as a man. And then we get married and the men expect us to revert to an entirely different mental system,” Stephanie told me. “Once only the sons were brought up like kings. But now we are brought up like queens. And when the kings and the queens are in the same house, they collide.”
Perhaps the most depressing stories I heard in Korea were about what happens to successful women in the dating market. Young men and women frequently use dating sites and matchmakers, and like everything else in Korea potential candid
ates are ranked. Women lose points if they are not working at all, but they lose even more points if they are overeducated or have the potential to work too hard. As a result, a woman with a PhD or a Fulbright scholarship, say, will lie, and downgrade herself to a master’s. (“They told me my schoolbag strap was too long,” one PhD in sociology told me, meaning she’d been in school too long.) A newly minted doctor I met said the last service she applied to “told me I’m unmarketable, because I went to a top university and I’m thirty.” Potential spouses were ranked as A, B, C, or D, I was told, and when people paired up, the A women and the D men often got left out.
By one estimate, nearly one in ten marriages in Korea involves foreign women. This is largely because there are so few women left in category D. They have all skipped up a notch, leaving the rural farmers or urban construction workers—the category D—without suitable brides. The men wind up importing brides from the Philippines or Vietnam. But the groom importation business having not yet taken off, the A women stay single.
Lacking a homegrown heroine, the lonely hearts take solace in Sex and the City, or in the surprise local hit by French feminist theorist Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory, about her own rape and prostitution and the idea that “when it comes to sex today, everyone’s getting screwed.” Not meant for comfort, exactly, Despentes’s manifesto at least helps unleash the rage.
Because this ideal of the attractive but not whorish white woman, in a good marriage but not self-effacing, with a good job but not so successful she outshines her man, slim but not neurotic over food, forever young without being disfigured by the surgeon’s knife, a radiant mother not overwhelmed by diapers and homework, who manages her home beautifully without becoming a slave to housework, who knows a thing or two but less than a man. . . . I for one have never met her, not anywhere. My hunch is that she doesn’t exist.