Voices of the career delayed: Korean millennial women's underemployed experience

Abstract

South Korean Millennials have exceptional educational, cultural, and professional backgrounds compared to other generations, but they are overqualified and underemployed in the country's competitive job market. Moreover, Korean Millennial women face more complex forms of discrimination than Korean men. Thus far, most empirical studies have illuminated the problem of unemployment rather than that of underemployment, and studies of women in underemployment are even rarer still. This study employed a feminist methodological approach, conducting qualitative interviews in order to reveal well-educated Korean Millennial women's job experiences and how living in a male-dominated society and patriarchal system affects them. This study used thematic analysis to examine ten underemployed Korean Millennial women's job experiences. Through feminist qualitative interviews, the ten women not only revealed their experiences of being subjugated as women employees at work, they also highlighted both the negative and positive sides of being underemployed.