Women Bullying Women at Work
In today’s Korea Times, with links and and a little extra information that I couldn’t squeeze into the 800 word limit:
No Room for Sisterhood in Today’s Workplaces?
In U.S. workplaces, women are primarily bullied by other women rather than by men, the New York Times reported last week, and the news quickly went viral as it busted some long and deeply-held stereotypes about the women’s movement.
In total, 60 percent of bullies in U.S. workplaces are men, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI), a national advocacy group. But whereas they tend to target both sexes equally, their female counterparts choose other women as their targets over 70% of the time.
These figures were surprising because they arrived in an environment where the glass ceiling remains quite strong: a 2008 census by the nonprofit research group Catalyst, for instance, found that only 15.7 percent of Fortune 500 officers and 15.2 percent of directors were women. On that basis, it had been natural to assume that many women workers identify themselves as members of a repressed group, and consequently are more supportive and nurturing of each other in their working lives than men are.
Yet in reality, as numerous examples provided by the WBI attest to, there is little sense of feminist solidarity in the workplace. Why?
One reason is the record number of working women in the U.S., who are now more numerous than working men for the first time in history, primarily because the recession has hit male-dominated industries. Yet reaching this point has long been predicted, and as women also make up more than 50 percent of management, professional, and related occupations, then the surge in their numbers isn’t the result of them taking low paid and/or irregular work to make ends meet during the recession either.
But ironically this may actually increase pressures on women, as with so many now going after top jobs, yet a variety of discriminatory practices still preventing most from acquiring them, then it is logical for women to perceive female coworkers as competitors rather than as possible allies. Add the stereotype shared by both sexes that women are less tough and less likely to complain about bullying than men also, and it’s a wonder that this gender dimension to bullying in the workplace wasn’t noticed much earlier.
( Source: fav.or.it )
If anything, this competition is likely to be more cut-throat in Korea, where it is primarily women that are losing their jobs. As this newspaper reported in March for instance, of the 166,000 of Korean 30-somethings had lost their jobs the previous month, only 9000 were men.
That was not necessarily due to discrimination in itself: in a recession, all companies fire their irregular and temporary workers first. But in Korea, a disproportionate number of these are 30-something women, largely due to this group being singled out for firing during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98.
That was explicitly for discriminatory reasons, the logic being that fathers and husbands would provide for their families or wives respectively. Unfortunately, government and business sentiments have little changed since.
In January, President Lee Myung-bak was quoted as saying that “the most urgent issue on our hands is to create jobs for the heads of households” (see #2 here), and as reported in Wednesday’s Hankyoreh newspaper, many Korean companies are encouraging pregnant women to resign, or are making their working lives intolerable if they don’t.
Consequently, compared to other OECD member countries Korea comes dead last on many indicators of women’s position in economic life, and it was without exaggeration that a 2007 OECD report described the country as the worst to work in for women. For example, in addition to extremely long working hours, the wage gap between men and women, which showed slow but steady improvement in the two decades before the Asian Financial Crisis, has stagnated at women earning roughly 64% of what men do ever since.
In these circumstances, it is to be expected that Korea also has one of the lowest women’s workforce participation rates also: according to the Korea Labor and Society Institute, 41.9 percent of all women aged 25-54 were working in 2006, little changed from an average rate of 41.5 percent for 1995-99, or, indeed, of 38.2 percent in 1980. The corollary of this is one of the lowest birth rates in the world, for Korean women are naturally choosing to have one child or none at all in order to work. But at least two are required to maintain a population.
There is perhaps no greater indictment of a society than the unwillingness of its members to raise children in it. But with wages being cut, hours being raised, and stress levels rising for everybody during this recession, Korean women are even less likely to want to do so with having to compete so vigorously with other women just to keep their jobs, let alone break the glass ceiling.
Update: A brief but interesting discussion of the origins of the term “glass ceiling” and the reasons for its persistence is available at the Economist here.
Korean Sociological Image #4: Where do Korean Politicians Come From?
Apologies for the small size, but if you can see the pink and orange blobs for Korean politicians that were originally civil servants or in the military respectively, then you get the idea.
The graph is from this article in the Economist magazine, which asks the question of why professional paths to the top vary so much, but unfortunately only mentions South Korea when it says…
Countries often have marked peculiarities. Egypt likes academics; South Korea, civil servants; Brazil, doctors (see chart 2). Some emerging-market countries are bedeviled by large numbers of criminals, even if this doesn’t usually show up in their ‘Who’s Who’ records.
…yet is no less fascinating for all that. If I reluctantly confine my brief discussion to South Korea here though, then that predominance of civil servants among Korean politicians should be no surprise to anyone familiar with its Twentieth Century history (see here and here), and I’d expect to find much the same in other postwar “developmental states” also, particularly Japan that is their model and the former colonial power of most.
But of course their importance goes back much further than that (see here), as indeed it does in China, which has historically provided Korea with many governmental and political models to emulate. Hence the Economist is quite correct in painting Chinese Communist Party officials with (literally) the same brush also, for despite their modern ideological labels they are in many senses merely performing what are really quite timeless roles.
Other than that, I confess to being surprised at the number of politicians with military backgrounds, even though I’ve written a great deal about the pervasiveness of military culture in Korean daily life. One shouldn’t make too many generalizations from so little information though, and so I’d hesitate to make any links between the low numbers of politicians that were formerly lawyers and Korean legal culture also, although I’m certainly tempted!
(For all posts in the “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)
Korean Gender Reader
1. Number of Women Suffering Osteoporotic Fracture Increasing
So short that I may as well give the entire article:
Around 200 out of 100,000 Korean women are suffering from osteoporotic fracture, more than a four-fold increase over the past decade. The estimated annual socio-economic losses from such fractures are around W1.05 trillion (US$1=W1,275).
According to a 2007 survey by the U.S. National Institute of Health, the number of female osteoporotic fracture patients was seven times more than that of breast cancer patients, 2.5 times more than stroke patients, and 1.4 times more than heart attack patients.
Moon Sung-hwan, an orthopedist at Severance Hospital, said, “According to the World Health Organization, one in four women suffers a fracture in her lifetime. The rate increases to over 33 percent among those in their 60s or 70s, and 50 percent among those aged 80 or over.” Hip-joint fractures are particularly dangerous, since approximately 30 percent of patients die within two years.
I accept that a host of factors may be responsible for the dramatic increase, but as I make clear here, here, and here, Korean women go to great lengths to avoid the sun for the sake of light skins (to the extent that they now have among the lowest Vitamin D levels in the world), and as Korean women’s disposable incomes have gone up over the last few decades then so too has the range of whitening creams, lotions, and pills and so forth available to them, one of the most recent of which is that in this recent advertisement with Kim Hye-su (김혜수) for Korean cosmetics company Missha (미샤) above (source). It is not illogical to suppose that with greater spending on such items comes even greater care and attention to avoiding the sun, hence a drop in Vitamin D levels, and in turn a greater risk of osteoporotic fracture.
Naturally, that would be more young women than the middle-aged and older women most at risk, so there is an unresolved issue of timing with the recent increase. Alternative explanations?
2. South Korea Ranks Low In Terms Of Its Mothers’ Quality Of Life
For the details, see here. Again, just like with the UNDP’s 2008 “Human Development Index” and “Gender Empowerment Index” that I discussed here, whereas most countries’ economic indicators are also pretty good guides to the quality of life there, when it comes to Korea anything to do with women’s quality of life trails those economic indicators quite significantly. In this case for instance, its GDP was 15th largest in the world in 2008, but somehow it was only the 50th best place to be a mother (out of 158 countries surveyed).
I haven’t looked at the breakdown of the figures, but I would be very surprised if Korean maternal and infant death rates weren’t indeed the 15th lowest in the world or even lower, but that Korea lost a great deal of marks on its inability and/or unwillingness to reintegrate mothers into the workplace. For stark illustrations of just how bad Korea is in that regard, see here.
3. Jeong Ryeo-won’s Anorexia Problems?
In this interview, Jeong Ryeo-won (정려원) claims that she only lost the weight for a recent movie role, and never went below 40kg, but personally I think that the jury is still out on both. Regardless, in a sense it’s surprising that she’s been getting the attention that she has for it, considering that Biotherm presumably thinks that that caricature of an actual women above would not repel Korean women but be instead what they aspire to look like themselves (source). And if you think that that’s bad, wait till you see how she looked last July, when clothing retailer Giordano thought that pictures of her that scared my two year-old daughter would somehow have women rushing to their stores…
4. “If I Can Grope You, You Pass”
There’s been a great deal more discussion of the case of the student teachers sexually harassed by four teachers at their assigned public school earlier in the month (see #4 here), but probably the best is that at Brian in Jeollanam-do here, who also talks about the pervasiveness of this sort of thing at mandatory drinking parties at Korean workplaces. Here and here are two follow-ups also.
Meanwhile, the medical confinement of sexual predators has begun. According to Korea Beat, it’s a rare positive step, with rehabilitation as the goal.
5. Swearing Increases on Korean Television
A strange inclusion perhaps, but while there are naturally awkward aspects to all societies that its members are aware of but refuse to acknowledge and/or discuss (particularly sexual ones), in this part of world cultural norms of deference to authority, saving face, and not wanting to stand out in the crowd and so on probably mean that pressing social issues tend to get avoided for longer than in most.
So far, so cliched. Sure. But in a general sense, it’s a step in the right direction when popular culture reflects how people actually think, speak, and behave rather than cultural producers’ notions of how they should do so, and can create a feedback loop leading to more of the same
More concretely though, a spate of Korean women swearing on television, which appears to be occurring in the currently playing popular drama Cruel Temptations (아내의유혹) on the right in particular (source), may well challenge the sexist dubbing of foreign films and dramas, reported on by Robert Koehler in 2006:
A women’s group has issued a report on the “sexist” dubbing of foreign films and dramas, reports women’s newspaper Ilda The group took a look at some 27 English-language dramas shown on terrestrial broadcasting in September and October. It found that most of them employed sexist sexist practices when dubbed into Korean. Namely, male characters spoke in banmal, or “low language,” while female characters used jondaenmal, or “high/respectful” language, even though the original English dialogue made no such distinctions.
I don’t watch enough Korean television to know how prevalent this practice still is (can any readers fill me in?), but if it does still occur then it can only look more ridiculous in light of these new developments.
And I say “ridiculous” because a) it is, and b) I’m not so sure that any Korean couples even speak like that anymore, but then if any of my own limited circle of Korean friends used such a sexist division of language with their spouses and partners then we probably wouldn’t be friends in the first place! Can anyone without kids who gets to leave the house more than do I confirm that that is indeed out of date now (or not)?
6. Love and Marriage
( Source: Unknown )
First up, the Korea Times reports that there’s a recent trend for employers to set up events for their single employees to meet:
Here’s what they do ― First, companies offer their single staff to register for a large dating event offsite at a hotel or theme mark. Matchmaking companies then kick in with games and events to help the crowd get to know each other better. At the end of the session, participants pick ― through a secret ballot ― who they want to be with.
Duo says about 50 people are accepted for one session and 30 percent of them go home as a couple. Some companies host the event as much as four times a year.
Considering Koreans are physically at work for some of the longest hours in the world, albeit not actually working for much of them (see here), then these events certainly make sense, although I doubt that they’re so efficient and no-nonsense that 30 percent of participants “go home as a couple”(!). Which makes me wonder whether: the long hours and culture of the salaryman system is primarily responsible for the idea (or rather, the vestiges of it), and if so if it is mirrored in Japan especially; or the fact that most Koreans were raised in single-sex middle and high-schools until recently, and thus much prefer arranged, usually group meetings rather than being so bold as to ask the opposite sex for a date directly; or, most likely, a combination of the two?
Regardless, Korean companies clearly seem unlikely to go down the Western path of banning the practice anytime soon, but on a more grass-roots level Koreans I have spoken to about this personally have invariably been surprised to hear about what occurs – or rather, what doesn’t occur – in Western workplaces, and have taken a surprising amount of time to get their heads around notions such as “Don’t screw the crew.” But naturally my friends and students don’t speak for all Koreans, so I’d be interested in hearing what others have (had) to say.
Before I forget, Michael Hurt has written an excellent guide for (primarily) men on the positives and pitfalls of dating Korean women because of having such different backgrounds, including the effects of that single-sex schooling as mentioned. But don’t get the wrong impression: this is not a “How to screw Korean women” kind of Korean guide, but rather something I could very much relate to after being in a relationship with a Korean woman for the last 9 years, and that I wish had been available much earlier!
( Source: Jay Lee Photographer)
Also, Koreans are continuing to get married at later and later ages, compounded by the recent financial crisis:
The latest statistics compound the frustrations felt by baby boomer parents. Last year, the average marrying age was 31.4 for men and 28.3 for women. More and more Koreans are choosing to marry later in life. In 1981, Korean men got married at an average age of 26.4 and women when they were 23.2. This means in 27 years, the average marrying age has been pushed back five years. Three out of 10 Koreans between the ages of 25 and 34, which are considered prime marrying years, are single.
In addition, the crisis is also having an effect on the kind of ceremonies couples that actually do get married actually have, practicalities and strained finances forcing a rethink in the previous norm of the groom’s family paying for the couple’s apartment, and the bride’s for the contents.
A more equitable, more Feminist arrangement because it’s the cheapest? God moves in mysterious ways!
And finally, here is a story about a matchmaker that is setting up North Korean defectors with eligible South Korean men.
7. Quick Links
- A follow-up on the Joo Ji-hoon drug scandal, which I discussed last week.
- KoreaBeat briefly discusses a TV program about a 23 year-old that leads a double life as a university student and a prostitute, and also about the military opening up to girlfriends, sisters and mothers by encouraging conscripts to blog about their experiences. Considering the huge socialization effect of military conscription on Korean men, then this may ultimately prove much more significant than it probably first appears.
- And last but not least, more information on the cost of studying in Korea at Extra! Korea here, and part and parcel of the primarily financial and not cultural reasons that Koreans adults live with their parents until marriage.
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