(un)Recognized Discrimination: : A Study of Sexual Harassment and the Disparity between Law and Practice in the South Korean Workplace

ABSTRACT During the last four decades, the active participation of South Korean women in the country’s economy has increased steadily. This has been followed by the enactment of several legal acts aimed to protect female workers from discrimination at the workplace. As this study will show, there exists a great disparity between the level of legal protection against sexual harassment and the actual practice of it in the workplace. While approximately 50 to 80 percent of female workers are thought to have experience sexual harassment in the workplace, less than one out of ten report the offence. To understand what causes this great disparity, I will focus on the country’s socio-political background and its influence on legal measures, the social consciousness, employers’ sense of responsibility in preventing and handling sexual harassment, the perception of female workers by their male counterparts, and the personal experiences of sexual harassment faced by women. This is provided as a necessary framework to understand the gender relations and hierarchy under which sexual harassment thrives. The thesis is partly based on my own fieldwork–a series of interviews with women who have experienced or otherwise dealt with sexual harassment and partly on analyses of relevant literature. It gives us insight into the thought processes behind the decisions of women on whether or not to report sexual harassment