South Korean women are fighting to be heard

ENTERPRISING WOMEN are everywhere in South Korean film and television. In “The Handmaiden”, a film by Park Chan-wook, two women team up to take revenge on their male tormentors and eventually elope as a couple. “Crash-landing On You”, a television series that had the country glued to its screens this year, features a chaebol heiress who cuts ties with her family to set up her own business and ends up romancing a North Korean pianist. The driving force in “Parasite” is the twenty-something daughter of a poor family who is fed up with life in a dingy basement.

Enterprising women are increasingly visible in the real Korea, too. More young women are earning university degrees than men. More than 70% of women between 25 and 34 are active in the workforce. Young women are far more vocal than previous generations in challenging the conservative social mores that hold them back.

Under the post-war dictatorship, South Korea’s growth model relied on a clear division of labour: men did military service and went out to work, women raised the children and did the housework. What paid work women did tended to be subordinate to men’s, serving, for instance, to pay for their brothers’ education. Adverts often stated that applicants must have completed military service, effectively excluding women. Such rules...

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