The following is a post on South Korean conglomeration, the business conglomerates is the main focus of these posts; they are credited with spearheading south Korea’s capital Industrialization in the past few decades. They encourage gender inequalities in the offices.
The post looks at the social and cultural construction of gender in the offices of the headquarters building of “Taesong” their recruitment, job assignments, reward and social activities of men and women. In order to understand gender construction in the offices, the actors were divided into three namely the mole bourgeoisie, the male “new middle class” and the female “new middle class”.
The Bourgeoisie
Those in this group are the Korea group of male who male made gain by creating gender inequality and unequal differentiation between positions and career paths, it served as medium to legitimize paying lower salaries for work needed by the enterprise. The strategy whereby they use seniority as the main criterion for salary increase and requiring women to terminate their employment after a few years of service. The bourgeoisie were able to reduce costs by paying lower wages and benefits for the work women performed.
They channeled women into lower paying, dead end jobs through different hiring process used to recruit workers. The males at Taesong were hired through semiannual nation wild campaign placed in front-page adverts in major newspapers. Tests and interviews were conducted to judge the prospective employees intelligence etc those successful enter at level 4 and after 6 years or thereabout get to level 1 (department) head. But the women were hired at very different process; they were hired at the recommendation of their high school officials during their last years. They enter at level 5 and no hope of promotion. This mode of recruitment had economic implication. The salaries of their male counterpart was way higher than theirs, the male had extensive trainings which the women did not enjoy, since they had no collage degrees, this was used as an excuse to legitimize their low pay and continued stay in level 5.All this factors brought about factions.
New middle class male workers
In the organization the surest way to success is to work hard and produce results, the male often get in one anther’s way in order to climb the ladder of success, for it is often seen as humiliation for one from a lower level to overtake someone in the upper level. so as a way to clam things down, the management allocates money to divisional heads to organize recreational activities. when such activities are planed and organized, women are obviously left out, most start at about 7:30 or 8 pm while the women close at about 6:pm or they engage in activities which women cannot participate in such as visiting public bath and spending several hours gambling.
New middle class female workers
These are they that complained about such treatments given to women and as such were able to effect changes in the offices. In all, their contributions had meaningful impact in the way female office workers were treated.
