by ANDREW SALMON
Amid global fascination with Kim Yo Jong, book focuses on North Korea’s new-generation female power players
Tour guides don’t commonly threaten to hurl their charges off tour buses, but it happened in 2005 in Pyongyang.
This writer was part of a visiting delegation of overseas reporters in North Korea when a German journalist approached the tour guide, a Mr. Choi, with a brace of seemingly reasonable questions.
First, she politely established that then-leader Kim Jong Il would pass away at some point – a point that Choi, a grizzled former state security official who had the unenviable task of escorting 18 foreign reporters through Pyongyang, conceded.
Then she popped the big one. She wondered whether, after his demise, there might be any possibility that North Korea could, one day – perhaps, just maybe – be led by a female Kim family member….?
Choi turned an impressive shade of purple. “If I could, I would throw you off the bus for that question!” he roared.
Shocked silence filled the bus. Rather than trying Choi’s blood pressure further, the German reporter – and her 17 colleagues – let the matter rest. Needless to say, though, the incident raised sharp questions about gender equality in North Korea.
Upon hearing the anecdote, Chun Su-jin laughs.
“I am not surprised,” says the author of the just-publishedNorth Korean Women in Power: Daughters of the Sun (Hollym, Seoul, 2022), which examines four female power players in the little-known state. “North Korean society is still very much male-oriented – it’s like a men’s heaven.”
It is not alone. South Korea, for all its democratic governance, cosmopolitan nous and global cool has a very un-level gender playing field. According to Seoul’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, in 2021, it ranked 102nd among 156 nations surveyed in the Gender Gap Index, and women fell far behind men in the employment rate (57.7% versus 75.2%).
If that is grim, how bad are things for citizens of its pitifully poor – and deeply isolated – northern neighbor?
“The reason I wrote this book is that is it such a men’s paradise,” Chun, a 40-something reporter for the Joongang Ilbo, one of the top three dailies in South Korea, tells Asia Times. “But somehow, these four ladies came up the ladder.”
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