hankyoreh

By Seo Young-ji, staff reporter

“Ms. Kim” breaks into a cold sweat every time one of her coworkers offers to set her up on a blind date and she has to turn them down. The 30-year-old, who works as a librarian on contract for a large corporation, has actually been married since 2012. She hasn’t told the company. In fact, she hasn‘t even filed a marriage report.

Librarians are often hired on two-year contracts, which means job changes are relatively frequent. Kim’s worry is what effect her marital status may have on her employment prospects.

Her concerns come from bitter experience. When she was looking for a job last year, she listed her status as “married” on her resume, only to face rejection after rejection in the document review stages. For one company interview, she was asked point-blank when she planned to get married. She didn‘t get the job.

After that, she changed her resume and began listing her marital status as “single.” Soon, she was passing both the document reviews and the interviews.

“I thought the most important thing was to just get a job,” she said on Oct. 13. “People I knew were telling me the companies don’t like it when you‘re married, and I was worried about whether it might hurt me, so I decided to put off filing a marriage report until after I have a child.”

Sometimes companies are reluctant to hire women who are married but have not had children yet, due to concern that the women will become pregnant and need to go on maternity leave shortly after being hired.

The South Korean government has pledged various measures to stop career interruptions for married women. But as Kim’s story shows, the reality is grim. Another jobseeker, a 25-year-old surnamed Ahn, kept putting off filing a notice after her marriage in May out of concerns about hurting her prospects. Eventually, she bowed to pressure from her in-laws and became “officially married.”

Ahn, who is preparing for a flight attendant examination, explained her decision.

“When one of the airlines advertises jobs, the document interview is an important barrier you have to pass, and I was afraid I might needlessly lose points if I told them I was married,” she said.

“The teacher at my flight attendant training academy and my study friends all said there would be questions about my marital status. So now I‘m working on preparing a response for that,” she added.

Marriage is one of the main reasons for career interruptions among women. It also makes it more difficult to return to work. An employment trend report written last month by Korean Women’s Development Institute senior fellow Kim Jong-sook found that in 2013, the average length of time between a woman leaving the workforce due to marriage or childbirth and returning to employment stood at 9.7 years. With the average career break taking place when a woman is 27, the data mean that those interested in going back to work have to wait until they are 37.

“If a company denies that it‘s discriminating in this way, we don’t have any way of confirming it,” Kim said in a telephone interview.

“We need something like the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a government-affiliated institution for investigating and correcting discriminatory hiring practices,” she added.

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