Korean Anthropology - Women

Conventional wisdom in Anthropology would dictate that the subject of a discourse should be focussed in scope, single-mindedly sticking to the purpose at hand. Never having let lack of qualifications or traditional ideas like ability and experience to interfere with what I wanted to do, I’ve decided the next topic in my anthropological studies of Korea should be…

 

Women

Yes, all 25 million of them. Together.  Not too broad a topic I think (didn't intend the pun).

In one of the first business meetings I had shortly after I arrived here earlier this year, when I went out for lunch with the client, he asked me what I thought about Korean women, aren't they beautiful? Having worked in a number of foreign countries over the years for extended stays, I was familiar with this type of leading question, some kind of male fraternity thing where a business contact sees that you are on your own in his country and feels compelled to introduce you to a working girls agency.  Not really my thing, so best thing to do is backpedal quickly, change the topic. 'Um well, yes they're very nice. I think. Very tall, they seem to have abnormally long legs', I mumbled.  Or something like that, maybe the part about the legs I only said inside my head.  But this time, the reason he asked wasn't at all to introduce me to Seoul's seedier side - he was only looking for an opportunity for his pet rant - facial feature artificial reconstruction. 

He launched into it, " It is all fake! None of it real. All these pretty girls have been to the clinic. "   I can only suppose that he had a teenage daughter who was pestering him to pay for her desired surgery. The rant went on for quite a while, he was quite upset at the number of teenage and twentysomethings who chose to put their faces under the knife.   Reliable statistics are not readily available as all of this happens behind closed doors of private clinics. One source at Leeds University, suggested it might be as high as 30% for selected groups of the population (by comparison, 1% of the population in the UK have done plastic surgery). It is rising in popularity among men but the main voluntary victims are teenage girls and young women.  The advertising is ferocious. The underground stations, billboards, magazines will feature pictures of a fairly gruesome looking, photo-shopped 'Before', looking like the poor girl got her head caught in a vertical press and the glamourous and glossy 'After' shot. The pressure must be enormous. According to my business contact, it is the most sought-after high school graduation gift for young girls. Unlike the West, breast implants (a truly bizarre thing to do to oneself) are not overly popular, the operation of choice is the 'double eyelid' removal. Which I don't understand - I've not seen anyone walking around with a double eyelid, where is it anyway? On the forehead?

But it works. Korea is filled with huge numbers of young women who look exactly the same as images of women in glossy fashion magazines and the ubiquitous advertising.  According to statistics (please refer to www.FormosaStatisticalEvidence.com, a great site where I get all the documented evidence I need, currently under construction) the Republic of South Korea has the highest proportion of women who look like a glamourised advertising image. I hold myself back from using words like 'pretty' or 'attractive' as these are subjective terms and I'm supposed to be attempting to be an anthropologist. But I have to say, as a male, it isn't really interesting. (Advice to my male readers - from past experience, I'd say if you've got a chance to date a woman who aspires to look like a model in a magazine, most likely you are better off to date the original, i.e the magazine.  I don't mean that to sound cruel,   but any relationship where one party is self-absorbed on image and style, may not have much of a chance.)

So what about the other 70% of the female population of Korea?  Are they filling the corridors of industry?  Has the feminist revolution inspired them to break the shackles of male oppression and lead Korean society to a Brave New World?  Well, they've got the coffee shop waitressing covered, cinema attendants, supermarkets are all ok. As part of my work, I've been around to factories and manufacturing facilities, offices both big and small, engineering labs, research labs - and yes, women are there, but they make the tea, greet visitors and stand in as decoration.  They've got bucket loads of them in Admin - teams dedicated to adding up the numbers from 1 to 5 and then others handle the numbers from 6 to 10. Yes, I know - Europe and the UK are not all that much better.   

What happened to women with engineering degrees?  In high school, GCSE's and A-Levels, women excel in math and sciences, year after year surpassing boys (who are sadly addled with so much testosterone during those years they are lucky to be able to pull up their zips let alone pass a physics exam). But then, where do they go? Somewhere between being the top students at science and math A-Levels, they simply disappear - they never make it into the engineering schools. Which means they never make it into manufacturing and design. And if they're not in manufacturing and design, what's left is hairdressing. (Yes a rather biased view against the Arts, Politics, Business and Finance sectors but I'll invite anyone to try to prove the relative value.) 

Before I left for Korea, I was working on a large manufacturing project that took me around several countries in Europe for the better part of 2 years. During the last year I had a student on an internship assigned to me. A young woman (let's call her D, not her real initial) who is reading for her degree in Process Manufacturing. We spent several months travelling around France and Germany together and became good friends (only friends! ).  I wondered to her many times during late night dinners, where do all the women engineers disappear to. She didn't have a good answer. But she admitted that it was relatively easy.  There was no open difficulty, there was no misogynist  machinery stacked against her and, mostly, she was judged on her ability. (Which was considerable, she is really bright and capable).  But almost alone. In her class there are but a handful of female engineers. In western Europe we have no excuse for this. The feminist revolution started more than a hundred years ago and exploded in the 60's and 70's, but then has gone no further.

Another anecdote - back in the 80's I had just graduated with my completely useless music degree but managed to get a job with one of the top high tech American companies that was getting started in Europe.  I ended up (again) travelling all over Europe in factories, offices and so on. Never met a single woman engineer.  After a couple of years, I was asked to go back to the company R&D headquarters in one of the deep south states in the US for a period to work on a product.  I was shocked - well over 40% of the engineering workforce were women.  For heaven's sake, one came out of the NASA astronaut program. Granted, the majority of this was software engineering. But even so.  This was nearly 25 years ago.   In this respect, North America is decades ahead of Europe and Asia.

So where are the Korean women engineers. I haven't seen one yet.  There is a woman, maybe mid 20's, at one of the facilities where I go, who works as a sort of receptionist. There is a large hall at the office entrance, where they have conference rooms and some exhibits. Most of the time it is empty. Occasionally I have to pass through to get somewhere else.  She sits at a desk by herself, nothing but a ledger book and a pen in front of her. Every time I walk through, she stands and bows.  I nod back. I've not seen her do anything else. What a job, huh?

Yet another anecdote. (I realise this is unscientific anthropology, nothing but stories).  There is one Japanese company that I work with.  By pure coincidence, the engineer assigned to my project is a woman. The only one in the company research centre who isn't in administration. She's very good as it happens. But quite shy and withdrawn, uncertain about her English as she is about her abilities. I had dinner last week with the outgoing, retiring chairman of the company - a man with some integrity. He told me about the resistance he had had from within the company over the years about her. Openly hostile, backstabbing, nasty, misogynistic male colleagues. It took her many years to just to get promoted to a basic level well below her qualifications. I think Korea is not vastly different from Japan.  Unless something dramatic happens, there is another 5 or 6 decades of the sole role for women being bowing glamour mannequins.  So yes, rather harsh language but this topic is something that can get me angry.  A waste of human beings, and entirely self-inflicted.

Rather than another anecdote, I'll finish on a proper anthropological fact.  I've already mentioned in an earlier post how few Korean women smoke - less than 5%.  I was told by a Korean woman friend, that not very long ago, as recently as in the 90's, if a woman was seen smoking in public, she would get slapped (presumably by another woman). Now I found this to be a particularly charming story when I first heard it, as I immediately assumed this was some kind of self-appointed anti-smoking police.  I like the idea of smokers getting a good slap. But, on reflection, I suppose not - the slap police are more likely to be interested in repression. 

But, curiously, this small percentage is increasing ! Everywhere else in the world, both male and female, the percentage of the population who smokes is dropping. Except for Korean women.   I take this as conclusive proof that men have no monopoly on stupidity - it is equally distributed among both genders.