Women are disappointed with the work environment and corporate culture, so they want to create their own company.
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Editor’s note: This cancer culture that Korean companies discriminate against female employees can be said to be ingrained, and women are often tied to jobs with low incomes and no opportunities for promotion. Korean women who are desperate for this start their own business and launch their own company, hoping to take the initiative and the right to speak in the workplace. This article uses Korean entrepreneurial women as a perspective to describe their experiences and experiences in the process of work and entrepreneurship. Women’s “equal rights” appeals need to be satisfied and long. This article is taken from The New York Times, author Michael Schuman, and the original title “Blocked in Business, South Korean Women Start Their Own.”
At first glance, Energy Nomad seems to be a very ordinary Korean company, except that the employees working there are male. Eco Nomad’s male engineers are mostly in their 40s, dressed in dark jackets and black pants. They work either at the company’s office in Seoul or at a factory production line in the field. The only exception is that there was a young woman who, when a senior executive took her into a conference room, said she respected the salute.
But in the startup of Energy Nomad, the appearance may be deceptive. The only exception to this name is Park Hye-rin, 33, who is the owner of the company. She founded the startup in 2014. Park Hye-lin said: “My experience may encourage the next generation of Korean women, and I look forward to more young women joining our group in the future.”
A new generation of Korean women started their own business and launched their own company. Park Huilin is one of them. In a male-dominated corporate culture like South Korea, they encountered numerous obstacles and discrimination in the process of climbing the career ladder. They were desperately choosing a new path of entrepreneurship.
Altos Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Seoul. The head of the company, Park Hee-eun, said: “In terms of education, we Being equal to men. But after entering traditional businesses, women’s values are often underestimated. Women are disappointed with such work environments and corporate culture, so they want to create their ownthe company.
According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report, more than 12% of Korean working-age women participated in the creation or management of new companies in 2018 (the operating period is no more than three and a half years), compared to 5 years ago. %, this ratio can be said to increase substantially. Japanese women also suffer from similar prejudices in the workplace, but in comparison only 4% of women choose to start a company.
MasterCard International conducted a survey of 57 economies around the world last year. The report said that South Korea has made the most significant progress in promoting women entrepreneurs, and that the number of women who choose to start a startup in Korea exceeds that of men. South Korean government statistics also show that the number of new companies created by women last year accounted for about a quarter of the ratio, which has risen from before.
The cancer culture of Korean companies discriminating against female employees can be said to be ingrained, and this trend of female entrepreneurship is likely to reshape Korean corporate culture. Over the past 50 years, South Korea has been a miracle of economic development, from one of the world’s poorest countries to an industrial powerhouse dominated by microchips and smartphones. At the same time, however, women’s status in society has changed subtly, and women are often tied to jobs with low incomes and no opportunities for advancement.
According to OECD survey data, in South Korea, only about 10% of management positions are held by women, which is the lowest among member countries, and the pay gap between Korean men and women is the highest among them. .
This prejudice naturally also affects the field of entrepreneurship. In fact, no matter what the circumstances, creating a new company requires a lot of risks and requires a lot of effort, but in South Korea, entrepreneurs also need to take extra responsibility from male bankers, executives and even employees. pressure.
Kim Min-kyung, 35, is the founder of Luxbelle, a women’s and women’s lingerie startup. She said: “To be a female entrepreneur, you have to pay extra. Work hard.” In the face of such an environment, she did not retreat. According to conventional standards, she has been very successful before, working in a subsidiary of Samsung Group, this is a coveted job opportunity. But in a bureaucratic company like Samsung, she doesn’t feel the appreciation and attention from the company.. Although she had never experienced significant discrimination there, she knew that she could only be promoted to a very low position at the end.
“I think that in such a very traditional company, I should have no future as a woman,” Kim Min-jing explained. “I don’t think I can be promoted to a senior position, so I have to leave and start my own.” Career, this matter is not too late.”So she left Samsung in 2014 and after a year she founded Luxbelle with a partner to help women choose the right underwear style and size. She chose her entrepreneurial location in a trendy neighborhood in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. In this simple-decorated office, Kim Min-Jing completed everything he needed to start a business: designing underwear, managing websites, raising money, and personally measuring for customers coming offline. size.
“There is a concept of ‘super woman’
This type of entrepreneurship is rare in Korea, both for men and women. Because the families there are still relatively conservative, parents usually put pressure on their children and ask them to seek employment opportunities in government units or state-owned enterprises. South Korea’s financial system is mainly to provide financial services to large-scale group companies that dominate the economy, so venture capital is relatively scarce.
But in the late 1990s, this situation began to change due to the impact of the Internet bubble. More and more people accept the identity of entrepreneurs, and even think that entrepreneurs sound cool, and the funds available for entrepreneurship are more abundant. However, although the attitude of the whole society towards women is constantly changing, it is very slow. Whether they are parents or spouses, they still hope that married women can take responsibility for raising the next generation, taking care of housework and caring for their families.
In this regard, Lee Ji-hyang, a 28-year-old Korean entrepreneur, said she believes that Korean society will become more and more understanding of women’s professional demands and acceptance will be higher. She went on to say: “There is a concept of ‘super woman’, which is a kind of woman who can perfectly balance family and work. They exist as a role model. But there is also a concept that women now bear things. Too much.”
Li Zhixiang established his own company, Mark Whale, last year to sell his own perfumes. She started her own business in an all-female founder incubator in Seoul, where she began selling her first product, the car air freshener, mainly through online sales. She said: “I plan my future together with my husband. When I was looking for a job or a crossroads of entrepreneurship, my husband gave me encouragement.”
“I think I am definitely one of the current trends in women’s status in Korea.”She added this.
The Korean government is also beginning to take corresponding measures. Because with the current aging population, the Korean government hopes to have more women entering the labor market, thus maintaining sustained economic growth. According to government agencies responsible for startups, the government allocated $470 million in 2019 to support businesses created and run by women, which is 18 times the amount in 2015. In addition, public agencies have set aside a $7.6 billion budget for buying goods and services from companies of women entrepreneurs. Since 2014, Korea Venture Investment Corp., established by the Korean government, has allocated $35 million in government funds to other venture capital firms to invest in start-ups founded by women.
But despite this, women still face major obstacles in the business world, because almost all bank executives or corporate executives in Korea are male. It is precisely because of this that Jin Minjing found himself in a somewhat embarrassing situation, because she needs to discuss Luxbelle’s underwear business with venture capitalists, but the other side is almost all men. “They simply can’t figure out that this can even become a Door business.” There is no doubt that she is often rejected by the other party. In response, she said: “My confidence has fallen to the bottom.”
In addition, entrepreneurs often need to expand their contacts and chat conversations for female entrepreneurs. One of Luxbelle’s investors is a subsidiary of Lotte Business Group, which provides Jin Minjing with an office located in a business incubator. The manager of this investment company is a male. He often goes to dinner and drink with other entrepreneurs in the incubator after work. This is a common activity organized by colleagues in Korea. However, Jin Minjing is not invited, she is also embarrassed to take the initiative to ask to participate.
She said: “If female entrepreneurs want to know people from all walks of life and expand their networks, they must be strong enough to be placed in a male club environment. To do this, they want to drum It takes a lot of courage and it’s hard to take the first step.”
In addition, managing male employees is also a very tricky thing, and Jihae Jenna Lee quickly discovered this. After returning to Korea for more than a decade on Wall Street, she founded AIM in 2015 to provide financial investment advice to clients. Their office is located in the WeWork joint office space in a popular shopping district in northern Seoul, where she and six employees manage $40 million in funding from 4,200 investors.
In 2016, Jihae Jenna Lee hired a senior executive from a securities company in Seoul.Managers, hope to strengthen their company’s local business through this move. But then she discovered that the senior manager (male) had a hard time accepting the fact that his boss was a woman. Once, he let Lee not come to Taiwan in front of all the staff. Lee privately asked him to solve this problem, he apologized, and said his heart. “I really didn’t think my boss would be a female boss,” he said. Three months later, he left Lee’s company.
Jihae Jenna Lee said: “Many men in Korea are not used to seeing women in power. They are not accustomed to women’s decision-making power and are not accustomed to establishing partnerships with women. They may have seen a woman’s high life. Tube.”
“Males don’t put me on equal footing with them.”
Compared with Park Hye-lin who founded Energy Nomad, there should be no more extreme situations than she has experienced. Because she is engaged in manufacturing, this is an area where women are particularly scarce. Energy Nomad designed and produced this device to generate electricity when placed in flowing water, similar to a portable version of the Hoover Dam. Park Hye Lam used to work in a private company. The company cooperated with the South Korean government to build a small hydropower station. Her entrepreneurial inspiration came from this. In 2012, South Korea elected the first female president, the government strengthened support for professional women, and the encouraged Park Hui Lin finally decided to create Energy Nomad.
Initially, her vision and positioning of this product was used by residents in rural areas where poor countries could not access conventional electricity to help them use this product for clean, renewable energy. But then she found that the clients were mainly campers in the United States and those who worked or traveled in remote areas. In 2018, Energy Nomad’s product sales reached $2.8 million, more than three times that of 2017. Recently, the company received $165,000 in financing from SK Energy employees of Korean energy companies, which also helped Energy Nomad enter the Southeast Asian market.
At the beginning, Park Huilin worked with two partners to complete the design of the product, but after that she suddenly found a serious problem: they did not know how to make this product. This also forced them to start adjusting the company structure.Park Huilin began to hire engineers with experience in plant operation and operation. In South Korea, such engineers are usually middle-aged men. However, the resulting cultural collisions and conflicts—young, thriving entrepreneurs and older, risk-averse engineers—have led to changes in the company’s structure. Park Huilin’s original partners have left.
After that, she found herself in an unusual position. A young Korean woman managed a team of thirteen men who were older than her. This situation made her feel uneasy and felt a little isolated.
“I feel that I have to grow as soon as possible so that I can maintain the same level as my colleagues. I wake up every morning and I feel this way,” she continued. “But the hardest part of this process is me. There are no examples or female leaders who can learn or follow.”
She said that she is constantly encountering various kinds of discrimination in the process of starting a business, including meeting with other businessmen, even when she is with her colleagues, she will become a victim of the scorpion, but She feels powerless. “This kind of sexual harassment is happening every day,” she added. “And men don’t think this is a big problem.”
The problem at the Energy Nomad factory is very obvious. With Park Huilin’s meeting with the company’s senior operations manager increasing, the other party began to use no respect for her, and the tone of her conversation was as if she was just a subordinate of her own. Park Hye-lin said: “Even if I am a CEO, they don’t think I have an equal relationship with them.” But despite this, she still believes she can succeed, so she sold cars and houses to raise money for start-ups.
“Doing this thing actually makes you feel very lonely,” she said at the end. “The advantage is that I can be a pioneer, and let other women see that we can also open up our career territory.”
Translator: aiko