Sex Discrimination in Korean Newspapers
the female reporters experienced discrimination from sources at least once.
Because information is crucial to reporters, a lot of women identified this
exclusion of information through informal routes as a problem. Women are not privy to
information because experts, public relations practitioners and other sources are males. “In
the Korean news business, there are a lot of informal drinking gatherings between
reporters and sources. The male reporters and sources exchange important information
in relaxed settings, excluding female reporters,” an assistant-editor said.
The situation is worse for married female journalists and those with children. In
Korean society, women are chiefly responsible for housework and childcare, even when
they have full-time jobs. It is difficult for married female journalists to join every informal
gathering with sources or PR people -- mostly males -- after work. This is a problem for
more than half of the respondents who are married (52 percent) and who are mothers (49
percent). However, circumstances not allowing women to join professional informal
gatherings after work may be more of a societal problem than a newsroom one.
Sexual Harassment
Virtually all of the respondents (99 percent) had heard male managers or
colleagues make degrading remarks about women, making this a serious problem in the
news business in Korea. These women vehemently reported that sexual harassment
ranged from telling sexual jokes to making uninvited physical contacts. One respondent
related that a male manager assigned a female reporter to write male-genital problem
stories, saying “men readers feel more aroused when women write those kinds of
things.”
Frequent comments described males pretending to be drunk as they made sexual
advances or that respondents experienced “unwanted physical contact by the men in the
Convention