Hi Mike, I believe you are confusing pay with earnings. Women on average make different decisions: They choose to work less hours, enter fields that don’t make as much money, and have children. So they spend less time earning money. I’ve heard stories of women experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace, which is terrible, but I doubt they’re discriminated when it comes to pay. If employers were actually getting away with paying women less per hour than a man, then they’d have a huge incentive to hire more women. Simply isn’t happening.

In the West, there’s this rampant myth that women earn 78 cents for every dollar a man makes. The reason it’s lower in Korea is because Korean women tend to work less than their Western counterparts, holding onto traditional family values and want to be stay-at-home moms while daddy goes out and makes the paper.

“When we decry the horrors Korean women suffered as ‘comfort women’ during the heinous colonization of this country by Japan, but stay silent in their fight to attain equality from their own people (minjok), we negate the very jeong that makes us one.”

It disgusts me that you would compare the atrocities of Imperial Japan and what those women experienced to what women experience today in Korea’s workforce. They’re not in the same category, at all. You think Koreans of the past who actually went through colonization and sex slavery would say that today’s Koreans problems are on the same level as theirs?

“Being a woman in Korea, or anywhere, should never equate to a lower wage.” Nope, it shouldn’t, and it doesn’t, but if they’re not working the same jobs and the same hours as men, then they’re not going to get paid the same.

“I have no doubt, and believe wholeheartedly, that if we organize such a strike, we can incite a tidal wave bent on washing away the ridiculous notion that women are inferior to men, and pave the way for future generations to thrive; equally.”

You interpret women making less money as some great misogynist conspiracy of the Korean patriarchy. Under the guise of “equality,” “justice,” and “fair treatment” of women, of “jeong,” you ignore the reality that men and women are different, make different choices, and how it reflects statistically over the whole society.

You want to get paid more? Work more hours. “No! You’re victims. The Korean patriarchy is oppressing you!” Well, Mike. Don’t you want to empower women? Why are you victimizing them and taking away responsibility from their choices? Do you hate women?

Korea has yet to be pervaded by feminism to the degree it has in the West, but it’s growing, thanks to individuals such as yourself who espouse feminist ideology. I mean, have you considered the critiques? This is not going to make Korean women any happier, just as it hasn’t been making Western women happier.

“Equal pay for equal work. Korea, it’s time.

Let the strike begin.

#HopeBeyondReason”

There is already equal pay for equal work. Women just choose not to work as much as men do, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you really want equal pay for equal work, then why don’t you encourage women to labor all day in the sun mixing and pouring concrete to build the roads and skyscrapers of Seoul?

#BeyondReasonIndeed