WORKING WOMEN
South Korean women start their own companies to challenge male-dominated culture,
HWASEONG, SOUTH KOREA— At first glance, Energy Nomad appears to be a typical South Korean company: Just about everybody who works there is male.
Crusty engineers, mostly in their 40s and dressed in matching dark jackets and black pants, hover over its production lines in a factory outside Seoul or work at nearby desks. The sole exception is one young woman, who deferentially bows her head as a senior manager directs her into a meeting room.
But at this startup, looks can be deceiving. The lone woman, Park Hye-rin, is the boss. She founded Energy Nomad in 2014. “I may be able to encourage the next generation of women,” Park, 33, said. “More young women might join me in this community of the future.”
Park is one of a new wave of Korean women who are starting their own companies. Frustrated in their climb up the corporate ladder in a male-dominated business culture, they choose to find another way up.
“In education, we are equal to men, but after we enter into the traditional companies, they underestimate and undervalue women,” said Park Hee-eun, principal at the venture capital firm Altos Ventures in Seoul. “Women are disappointed with the working culture, so they want to make their own companies.”
In 2018, more than 12 per cent of working-age women in South Korea were involved in starting or managing new companies — those less than 31⁄ 2 years old — a sharp increase from 5 per cent just two years earlier, according to Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.
In Japan, where women face similar biases, only 4 per cent are starting companies.
Similarly, a Mastercard report on 57 global economies last year said South Korea showed the most progress in advancing female entrepreneurs and that more women than men had become engaged in startups.
Government statistics also show that a rising percentage of new companies, about a quarter, were started by women last year. The trend could reshape a corporate world where discrimination against women is deeply entrenched.
South Korea has been a marvel of economic progress over the past 50 years, transforming from one of the world’s poorest countries into an industrial powerhouse famous for its microchips and smartphones.
But notions of women’s role in society have changed slowly, often trapping them in poorly paid jobs with little chance of advancement.
Only about10 per cent of managerial positions in South Korea are held by women, the lowest among the countries studied by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, while the gap in pay between men and women is the widest.
These biases infect the startup sector, too. Building a new enterprise is a risky endeavour in any circumstances, but South Korean women often are not taken seriously by male bankers, executives or even employees. “You have to put extra effort into being a female entrepreneur,” said Kim Min-kyung, founder of a personalized lingerie company, Luxbelle.
Kim, 35, was undeterred. By the usual standards of success in South Korea, she had already made it big, landing jobs at affiliates of the Samsung business group, among the most coveted positions in the country.
But she felt unappreciated within Samsung’s bureaucracy. Though Kim never faced overt discrimination there, she said, she also knew she would eventually smack into a very low glass ceiling.
Kim quit Samsung in 2014 and started Luxbelle with a partner a year later. Its website guides women in choosing and fitting lingerie, under the brand name Sara’s Fit, which they can then buy online.
From a bare-bones, two-room office in a hip neighbourhood in Seoul’s Gangnam district, Kim has tackled almost all aspects of the business — designing the lingerie, managing the website, raising capital and personally measuring customers who stop in for some offline attention.
This type of entrepreneurship was once a rarity in South Korea, for any gender. Still-conservative families tend to press their children to seek more predictable employment within the government or at the nation’s big enterprises.
Venture capital was scarce in a financial system built to funnel funds to the large conglomerates, called chaebol, that dominate the economy.
The situation began to loosen up during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. Entrepreneurship became more socially acceptable, even cool, and money became more widely available.