Rethinking Double Jeopardy: Differences in the Gender Disadvantage between Organizational Insiders and Outsiders in Korea

Abstract

This study examines the distinctive patterns of gender inequality in the primary and secondary labor markets in Korea. Previous studies that analyzed multiple disadvantages in the labor market tended to focus on comparing the gender wage gap between groups. By failing to distinguish the gender gap from discrimination, these studies often underestimate the severe within-job discrimination that women in minority positions experience. Using the wage gap decomposition method, this study analyzes the gender wage gap according to separate labor market positions. The results indicate that the size of the gender wage gap is greater in the primary labor market than in the secondary market, but that a sizable amount of the gap in the primary market can be explained by demographic differences between male and female workers. In the secondary labor market, the gender wage gap is relatively small, but mostly caused by within-job wage discrimination against women. The divergent pattern of gender inequality—large gap-small discrimination among organizational insiders and small gap-large discrimination between organizational outsiders—shows how the segmented labor market provides a structural condition to create the complexity of gender inequality, in which women experience different forms of disadvantage depending on their positions in the labor market.