As campaigners around the world marked International Women’s Day on March 8 with marches and celebrations, Shin Gyeong-ja will be doing what she does nearly every weekend—clocking in for another long shift in the produce section of a big-box retailer.
Shin lives and works in Daegu, a city about two hours by train southeast of Seoul that is a stronghold for embattled President Yoon Suk Yeol. While shelving onions and apples for the Homeplus store chain, known as a “mart” in South Korea, the 58-year-old hopes to avoid being harassed and abused by far-right activists angry at women workers like her who are union members and wear buttons supporting the impeachment of Yoon over his attempt to impose martial law last December.
“I’ve been screamed at and spat on,” Shin told Nikkei Asia. “We wear red uniforms at Homeplus, so they accused us of being Chinese spies.” South Korea has long had a far-right fringe with strong views about the threat of communist takeover, but Yoon’s open endorsement of such theories has brought them further into the mainstream.
South Korea has the biggest gender wage gap among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—nearly 30% as of 2023. Efforts to promote equality for women have run into stubborn resistance, or even been rolled back, long before the global pall cast over programs to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) by the new US administration of President Donald Trump.
Before taking office in 2022, Yoon depicted South Korean society as being unfairly skewed against young men and announced plans to dismantle the gender equality ministry. Women continue to earn less on average than men in full-time jobs as experts say many companies stick with employment practices rooted in a time when women were assumed to be married, or intending to get married, and deemed not to need a wage to allow them to live independently.
“Female workers in marts or in care work, their jobs are undervalued due to cultural norms,” Lee Byoung-hoon, a professor and expert on industrial relations at Chung-Ang University, told Nikkei Asia.
“In [South] Korea, many employers still pay women less because they think that women’s jobs are a kind of supplementary income to their husband’s earnings.”
Women also account for the majority of the millions of workers officially described in the country as “irregular” that provide a vital skeleton for Asia’s fourth biggest economy.
Such workers toil in low-paid jobs with minimal or no benefits such as paid leave and sick days, in industries like services and hospitality on a temporary, part-time, or day-job basis.
While the employment participation rate for women has risen to within touching distance of the OECD average, 25% of working women were irregular workers in 2024, according to Statistics Korea.
For men, the figure was 16%.
Women in the 50–59 age group, like store staffer Shin, accounted for the biggest portion of working women last year—nearly one in four—closely followed by the 60-and-over group, Statistics Korea data show.
Like Shin, a resolute mother of two, many only start working full time in their 40s after raising children, entering with few qualifications for well-paid jobs in a cutthroat South Korean labor market—where Seoul remains the magnet for opportunity and talent—amid now-sluggish economic growth.
The adjustment to workplace environments can be awkward, along with suddenly having to juggle family and job responsibilities, said Jung Hong-young, a 53-year-old employee at an outlet of big-box retailer Emart in Daegu.
“It can be shocking getting scolded by managers who are sometimes not much older than my children,” Jung told Nikkei.
“Mart workers have no work-life balance,” said Homeplus worker Shin. “Female workers have to endure a lot of unfairness and use a lot of intuition when dealing with their managers.”
Kim Dae-rae, a professor of economics at Silla University, noted in a recent column that as South Korea’s population ages, incentivizing women to remain in the workforce is crucial to the country’s economic future.
“It is not that women get paid less than men for the same work, it is because women’s path to high-income jobs is blocked. That is why many women wish to work as teachers and civil servants,” Kim wrote.
Many of these women work at marts, one-stop outlets that remain open for long hours, where families can purchase groceries, appliances, clothing, toys, and other household items.
When a trade union conducted a survey of mart workers, 90% of the respondents were women. Mart staff typically work in shifts, either from 7:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. or starting at 3 p.m. and wrapping up at midnight.
In her 15 years working in the produce section at Homeplus, Shin has endured low wages and grueling work hours, often forcing her to miss family gatherings. She earns only slightly more than the minimum wage of KRW 10,030 (USD 7.05) per hour.
For Shin, daily life is comparatively simple, as both of her children—one son and one daughter—are grown and self-sufficient. But she empathizes with colleagues still raising kids. “Our work schedules change all the time, so it’s really hard to plan how you’re going to get kids from school, take them to their after-school classes, then get them home,” she said.
A new source of struggle for Shin emerged in recent months as her country became embroiled in a political crisis: Far-right, Yoon-supporting political activists have taken to storming the store where she works, berating and threatening workers they say are covert communists. Now impeached, Yoon currently awaits a constitutional court ruling that will determine whether he is formally ousted from office or reinstated.
Homeplus didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Yoon and his top aides have put forth unsubstantiated theories about how undercover agents from China and North Korea are seeking to overtake the country. His supporters contend that Yoon is a bulwark protecting South Korea.
The claims resonated in Daegu, a city of 2.3 million that is a bastion of conservatism and Yoon’s ruling People Power Party. During South Korea’s economic boom years of the 1970s and 1980s, the city received generous government investments that created the regional manufacturing base of giants like Hyundai, Samsung, and POSCO that fueled the country’s economic rise.
What drew Yoon supporters’ ire to the Homeplus outlet where Shin works was a decision by her and some other workers to wear buttons supporting impeachment, as well as their union activities. Shin said the city’s conservative political character and innate distrust of labor unions make it harder to recruit members to negotiate with management.
In early February, a union representing mart workers filed a complaint with police over harassment they say workers have faced from Yoon supporters.
The union told police that members of far-right groups had converged on marts to threaten and verbally abuse workers, and had taken photos of them that they circulated in far-right online forums, leading to online harassment.
Changes in the retail sector away from brick-and-mortar stores and toward online platforms have worsened conditions at outlets big and small.
“Jobs in retail are under threat now because of the rapid growth in the volume of online shopping,” said Chung-Ang University’s Lee.
The Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry said late last year that sales at big-box retailers had grown only 1.2% per year in the decade from 2014 to 2024, trailing far behind the 13% growth seen by online shopping platforms and 10% at convenience stores.
The chamber said the fast-growing platforms had benefited from changes in consumer habits spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and the overall advancement of digitization. “Large marts have become less competitive due to the rise in one- and two-person households and long-standing restrictions on their operations,” the chamber concluded.
In an effort to boost mart sales, Daegu in early 2023 became the first municipality nationwide to repeal a legal order requiring marts to close on two Sundays a month. The law had been put in place to guarantee workers time off with their families, and to attempt to steer customers toward smaller retailers, like neighborhood grocery stores.
Daegu’s city government argued that changing the regulation to require marts to close on two weekdays a month, while remaining open every Sunday, would benefit consumers by making it easier to shop on weekends and lead to increased sales.
But for workers in the sector, never having a guaranteed Sunday off is another thorn in their sides as they attempt to balance work and family.
“My daughter works during the week and only has weekends off. When I have to work weekends, it means I don’t see her for weeks at a time,” said Yang Eun-young, a worker with 20 years of experience at an Emart in Daegu.
“This kind of work, the long hours standing, the repetitive manual tasks, is hard on our shoulders, our knees, and for women our age who are going through menopause, the irregular schedule makes it hard to establish a rhythm and get decent sleep,” Yang, 56, said.
Still, for Shin, labor rights in South Korea have markedly improved since she entered the workforce.
She recalled how years ago workers in her store dared not push back against directives—however rude or pedantic—from their supervisors. Back then she even had to ask permission to go to the restroom during work hours.
How would she react if a supervisor forced her to do that nowadays? “I’d punch him,” she said with a chuckle.
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.