고학력 전문직 여성의 노동 경험과 딜레마:강한 직업정체성과 남성중심적 조직문화

Abstract

Even though the proportion of the highly-educated women with professional jobs has been increased rapidly in Korea, gender discrimination at the labor market has not decreased at the same speed. This study aims to figure out the specificity and complexity of the labor experiences of Korean professional women by conducting in-depth interviews. The results of the research demonstrated that professional women had strong Job-consciousness, job identity, and desire for self-achievement. Despite the fact that some professional jobs lack autonomy and require simplicity or repeated routine process, most professional women want to continue their work until the time of retirement. The interviewees emphasized that the works they are doing are very significant because the work career is now a part of them. It is the place they want to keep, which can be named as ‘here to stay’. Women want to be evaluated based on their efforts, capacity, and capability. However, the fact that the number of professional women is small resulted in many facets as ‘token professionalism’. By doing in-depth interviews, I could find that the source of dilemma for Korean professional women is moving from ‘combining work and family’ to ‘discrepancy between subjective evaluation of own work by herself and evaluation of her work by patriarchal organizations and society in general’.