Under gleaming studio lights, Lee So-jeong read straight from a teleprompter, rehearsing her lines ahead of the prime-time newscast for the public Korean Broadcasting System (KBS).
Five times a week, she is beamed into living rooms across the country leading its KBN News 9 bulletin, after she broke into a decades-old boys’ club in a society that is technologically and economically advanced, but still culturally male-dominated.
South Korean TV news broadcasts have long followed the same format: A serious-looking older male anchor announcing the day’s major developments, with a much younger female sidekick delivering lighter items later in the lineup.
Photo: AFP
Some of those women juniors went on to marry into the billionaire families who own South Korea’s conglomerates, rather than continue their careers.
Lee’s appointment at state-funded KBS upended that model. At 43, she even has a younger male sidekick of her own.
Female news readers used to be like “pretty flowers,” Lee told reporters.
However, she had greater ambitions, wanting to transform KBS’ conservative style and capture younger audiences turned off by broadcasts that tended to “rather lecture the viewers.”
The audience share for her program — the most-watched news broadcast in the country — has risen from 9.6 to 11 percent since she started in November last year.
However, Lee felt the pressure of being a trailblazer, knowing — however unfairly — that she cannot afford a single mistake.
“If I fail in this, it could disgrace other women reporters as a whole,” she said. “I have to do well so that other female reporters could have more opportunities.”
“That sense of responsibility and burden is greater than live broadcasting prime-time news,” she added.
South Korea has transformed itself from the ruins of the Korean War to become the world’s 12th-largest economy, and an industrial and trading powerhouse, but traditional social values still hold wide sway.
Its gender pay gap is the highest among developed countries, with women making only 66 percent of what men earn, while working mothers face pressures to excel at both child-rearing and their jobs.
Many face promotional barriers at work while carrying heavy childcare burdens, often forcing educated women to give up their careers.
Those pressures have led many South Korean women to reject motherhood and the country’s fertility rate — the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime — dropped to 0.98 in 2018, far below the 2.1 needed to keep a population stable.
The trend is all too familiar to Lee, who started in television in 2003 and is herself the mother of a six-year-old son.
“I have seen many veteran female journalists whose career was cut short,” she said. “It was both disappointing and upsetting.”
Such challenges are the subject of the hit film Kim Ji-young, Born 1982.
Based on a feminist novel that triggered a backlash among men, it centers on a married South Korean woman who has quit her job and struggles to raise her child with limited support.
Lee said she had also faced difficulties following her return from year-long maternity leave.
“I felt like I was not good enough as a mother nor a journalist,” she said. “Then a senior woman colleague called me in and told me that I should not be too hard on myself.”
“I wish young women would try their best at work, but not blame themselves for things out of their control,” she said.
However, values are beginning to change, with the country seeing a vocal #MeToo movement in 2018.
Appointing a female main news anchor met “the demands of the times,” KBS news operation managing director Kim Jong-myong said.
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