The End of Men and the Rise of Women (33 page)

Two thousand nine should have been a tremendous year for Hwang. She was thriving in her job, making more money than ever, and she had a beautiful son. But instead, she found herself full of intense, conflicting emotions with nowhere to put them. What made it worse was she had no role models to follow. A generation earlier, Korean women barely worked, so mothers had only vague advice to offer, and probably a dose of disapproval. And in this culture, shrinks are unheard of. So Hwang fell apart. “I was making excuses at home and excuses at work and I was so stressed out,” she says. “The guilty feeling that I couldn’t be with my kid was the worst thing I’d ever experienced. I wanted to be with him, to take care of him the right way, and I couldn’t.”

Why didn’t she quit her job? “Because I had to make money. Nowadays if you don’t have a double income you can’t properly educate your child and send him to the right schools.” She was a bad mother if she failed to stay home and take care of her child, and a bad mother if she failed to work and help pay for her child’s schooling. How could a woman win? Her dilemma would have been a familiar one to Americans, but in Korea it was a novelty to have someone say it aloud.

When I caught up with Hwang a year and a half after she ran the
ads, she had finally quit her job and started her own company. Now she is head of a small boutique advertising firm, Ark & Pancom. She is a rare female CEO in the industry, but she is not intimidated by the competition. Advertising, she figured, values creativity and attention to detail, qualities she believes women have in abundance. Since she made her confession, her husband started helping around the house more. On weekends if she is tired, he will sometimes watch their son by himself. But she still has to tiptoe around him. “I have to be cautious, to make sure he does not feel inferior to me.” She makes a point of asking his advice about small domestic decisions, new clothes for herself or a fish for their son’s aquarium. If he wants to have sex she complies, no matter how tired she is, because “I don’t want to wound his pride,” she says.

Hwang received hundreds of letters after her ads ran and was invited to speak at many public forums. She gives herself some credit for helping to change the climate for working women. After the ads ran, the government expanded child-care options for lower-income women, and more actively encouraged companies to offer flexible work schedules. And she is hopeful that younger men will change their ideas about working women and help out more around the house. But what about her life? Had it changed all that much?

Not really. In fact, Hwang’s family schedule would probably strike even hardworking Americans as alarming. She leaves the house at seven
A.M.
and returns home sometime between eleven
P.M.
and one
A.M.
“Most Korean companies expect us to work very late,” she says. “I’m the boss now, so I have to take care of everything.” I asked about her son’s schedule, and this was the only time I saw the flash of sadness that could have prompted her dramatic public confession. He comes back from kindergarten at three thirty each day and then goes straight to two cram schools, where he studies some
combination of art, painting, music, tae kwan do, English, Korean, Chinese, and mathematics. “I manage the cram schools through the nannies,” she says. She still doesn’t see him during the week, but she tries to spend most of her time on the weekends with him if she’s not too tired.

“I hope my son sees me as a good mother when he grows up,” she says. “I hope he sees me as someone who accomplished important things for his future.”

W
HAT’S THE ANSWER
? How does a new generation of Korean women fulfill their ambitions without destroying their souls? One solution bubbling up is something Korean authorities don’t want to discuss, something that wounds their deep sense of national pride and makes them panic about their future. Elite Koreans these days almost always spend some time abroad to improve their English, either in high school, college, or graduate school. Per capita, Korea exports a larger percentage of students than almost any other nation. Families who can afford it move to the United States or Australia for a few years, and those that can’t, send children to live with relatives.

The idea is that the students will come back and enrich the national economy. They will help the Korean conglomerates grow and better export their products. They will help exalt their country’s place in the global culture. They will transform the average Korean’s identity from one of provincial pride to that of sophisticated citizen of the world. But for the women especially, this is not always how it happens. When they travel abroad they realize that women in other countries live differently, that women in other countries do not pay such a high price for their ambitions. There is
a reason that the top ambition for young Korean women these days is “foreign diplomat” or “global leader.” Even as early as high school, they must sense that they will need an escape.

Yongah Kim went to college at one of Seoul’s most prestigious universities, and then got her MBA at Harvard Business School. When she graduated in 2001 she interviewed with a large Korean conglomerate, a Korean bank, and several foreign firms, including a few investment banks and consulting firms that had expanded their business in the country after the economic crisis of the 1990s. At the foreign consulting firms she was asked very specific, logic-driven questions: How would you solve the traffic problem in Seoul, for example. At the Korean firms the questions were more generic, and also intrusive: What are your strengths? Do you have a boyfriend? If you get married, would you continue to work? One interviewer said, “Let’s assume your boss asked you to fetch coffee. Would you do it?” Yongah answered: “Only if he would fetch coffee for me.”

“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.”