Career–family strategies and spatial mobility among South Korean women scholars

Abstract

This paper examines the mobility of female South Korean scholars and their career–family strategies for negotiating their relationships. Despite the importance of the relations and social capital of workers, previous studies on the mobility of highly skilled professionals have overlooked their social and personal relationships. South Korean women scholars consider not only career opportunities but also familial relations in the process of migration decision-making. To negotiate their relationships, they adopt strategies to build and maintain their relations at various geographic levels. Their strategies for making networks are complex and vary according to career, personal and familial goals.

Keywords

mobility scholars relations gender family

Introduction

Many studies have paid attention to the transnational mobility of highly skilled professionals (HPs), mostly in corporate business, drawn into global cities (Beaverstock, 2002; Sassen, 2010). Many cities have adopted various policies to attract HPs to spur local economic growth (Florida, 2002; Yeoh and Eng, 2008). People in certain occupations, such as research and development, who are creative and have high levels of educational attainment, are highly mobile and are viewed as contributors to regional economic growth.

However, a number of studies on the international migration of HPs have raised questions, gaps and assumptions about this category of migrants (Brown, 2015; Hansen and Niedomysl, 2009; Leslie and Catungal, 2012; Negrey and Rausch, 2009; Ryan and Mulholland, 2014; Scott, 2006). First, HPs are a diverse group of people in terms of nationality, culture, gender, language ability and levels and types of skills (Muller Myrdal, 2011; Scott, 2006). Second, we know little about how these professionals make their choices about migration and what their experiences are after moving (Brown, 2015; Hansen and Niedomysl, 2009; Ryan and Mulholland, 2014). Third, the view of HPs as ‘free agents’ has commonly been assumed in migration studies (Ross, 2008; Schaer et al., 2017) to the neglect of their social, cultural and political relationships (Brown, 2015; Ryan and Mulholland, 2014). In particular, studies of the migration of HPs do not pay adequate attention to the role of relations, including family and people's social network (Schaer et al., 2017; Shinozaki, 2014) that contribute to migrants’ deskilling and career discontinuity (Bauder, 2003; Iredale, 2005).

We question the premise of the mobility of HPs without considering social relationships in existing studies. Are HPs social agents who are not affected by relationships, or by considerations of gender or the nation-state? How do their social capital and familial relations affect their post-migration experiences at various geographic scales? What strategies do they adopt with their families and communities to negotiate the pursuit of their careers? We argue that cultural capital that is accumulated through new experiences from studying abroad, including certificates and degrees from world-class universities, may not be easily transferable or portable (Ackers, 2004; Erel, 2010; Ryan and Mulholland, 2014). The meritocratic view of HPs adopted in previous research takes young professionals as one homogeneous group and does not take into account socially and geographically embedded power relationships among different groups of people.

This paper aims to understand the migration of South Korean female scholars and their relations in the context of multiple geographic levels, such as host and home countries and cities within the country. In addition, we would like to examine the different factors that relate to the impact of relocation, such as gender and familial relationships, to the existing framework for understanding the mobility of HPs. Furthermore, we will discuss how female scholars build strategies to create and nurture local networks and social capital among Korean female scholars. This paper begins by explaining the mobility and migration of HP workers, in the following section. In addition, we will explore the women's enrollment in higher education and locational patterns in the South Korean context. Next, the method we adopted for the research will be presented, followed by findings on South Korean female scholars' experiences, including their departures, choices and adjustments in their everyday lives.

The mobility of highly skilled workers

The recent discussion about HPs sheds light on mobile human resources, specifically talented workers (Florida, 2002; Sassen, 2010). Overall, HPs are understood as ‘a fairly homogenous social-cultural group’ (Brown, 2015: 2339) with ‘frictionless mobility characterized by the absence of any kinds of meaningful encounter or incorporation in the host society’ (Smith and Favell, 2006: 15). HPs, with their knowledge and skills, can move and live anywhere they want, and local knowledge and networks are not necessary for them (Brown, 2015).

However, studies on HPs do not fully explain the following issues. First, differences in career paths between male and female migrants were overlooked except in a few studies (e.g., Shinozaki, 2014; Leung, 2014; Schaer et al., 2017). Moreover, only a few studies (Ackers, 2004; Schaer et al., 2017) paid attention to institutional factors, such as inequality in the labor market. In many cases, HPs' experiences in their home country, where a gendered labor market is dominant, affect migration decisions (Kim and Yoon, 2017; Schaer et al., 2017; Sondhi and King, 2017). However, studies on East Asians studying abroad and learning English have mainly focused on their efforts to achieve middle class status and accumulate social capital through expanding their network (Collins, 2008; Finch and Kim, 2012) or joining an elite group on account of a degree from a American*

Unless otherwise specified, the term “American,” as used in this article, refers to a person, place or university from the United States of America, where the female scholars in the study pursued graduate degrees.

university (Kim, 2011).

Second, to date, studies on HPs have paid little attention to gender differences in decision-making about migration (Ackers, 2004, Leung, 2014; Pessar and Mahler, 2003; Negrey and Rausch, 2009). This gendered decision-making process has often resulted in less mobility for female scholars (Leung, 2014) and has marginalized women in the workplace, restricting possibilities for networking with their colleagues (Herzig, 2004). Pessar and Mahler (2003: 816) argued that people are situated differently within power hierarchies based on ‘historical, political, economic, geographical, kinship-based and other stratifying factors.’ This is related to the sex division of labor within the family and the expected societal roles for different genders (Schaer et al., 2017). For example, common gender role expectations that women will care for children and men will be breadwinners are likely to apply to people in academia. Therefore, people in academia are not asocial agents whose geographic mobility is unaffected by factors such as gender and life-stage. More female than male scholars are likely to leave academia because of childbearing and childrearing.

The studies on HPs also relate to the discussion on cosmopolitan international students who obtain their degrees from world-class universities in more developed countries and accumulate cultural capital. These well-educated international students can carry their universal knowledge with them and work in so-called world cities (Beaverstock, 2002). However, many scholars have made the criticism that studies on HPs have paid little attention to their relations and efforts to build and nurture their networks in a new location (Nowicka, 2007; Ryan and Mulholland, 2014). We argue that expanding the focus of analysis of mobility and migration of HPs from an individual worker to the family context in different geographic levels can substantially contribute to understanding the complexity of their decision-making and adaptation strategies. We examine this issue in the present research. We contacted female South Korean scholars who obtained their doctoral degrees from American universities and had experienced at least two instances of relocation after graduation. They are women who struggled with the long history of gender inequality in their home country; however, they are also cosmopolitan, highly skilled workers after they graduate, with knowledge and cultural capital resulting from completing their doctoral degrees.

Female scholars in the Korean context

South Korean (hereafter Korean) society has emphasized meritocracy for centuries. Regardless of social status, an individual who demonstrates his or her ability can expect to move up in society. Since the 1980s, emphasis on educational achievement and professional success has rapidly been extended to Korean women. This has led to a higher rate of enrollment of female students both in undergraduate and graduate programs at Korean universities. The share of female graduate students in Korea has gradually increased since 2000, from 35.9 percent to 49 percent (Table 1). However, the high rate of female enrollment in graduate programs does not seem to be reflected in the number of women faculty members in Korean universities.

Table 1.

Number of female graduate students and university professors in Korea.*

Year	Graduate students			University professors*
Year	Total	Female	%	Total	Female	%
2016	332,768	163,179	49.0	65,300	14,733	23.6
2015	333,478	162,374	48.7	65,423	14,440	22.1
2014	330,872	159,894	48.3	64,378	13,739	21.4
2013	329,822	158,952	48.2	63,042	13,068	21.7
2012	329,544	159,032	48.3	61,993	12,465	20.1
2011	329,933	158,523	48.1	58,104	11,307	19.5
2010	316,633	152,367	48.1	55,972	10,637	19.0
2005	282,225	124,930	44.3	49,200	7,973	16.2
2000	229,437	80,072	35.9	10,887	929	8.5

The data pertain to higher educational institutions; female faculty members in two-year colleges, open and online educational institutions are excluded.

Source: Ministry of Education (2016).

Despite the high level of educational attainment, women's employment status continues to lag behind men's in Korea. Very few women have attained leadership positions in the country's corporations and other organizations (Park and Shahiri, 2015), and their salaries are lower than those of males who have the same level of educational attainment (Lee, 2017). Furthermore, as the number of women with doctoral degrees has increased in Korea, several issues, including the entrenched status of men in the local academic labor market, have become more apparent (Park and Shahiri, 2015; Kim and Yoon, 2017). In academia, female professors make up only 23.6 percent of the total faculty at four-year colleges in 2016. While the percentage of female professors has increased gradually, male professors are, by far, the majority of faculty at universities in Korea. More than two-thirds of tenured professors (76.4 percent) are men (Ministry of Education, 2016). The majority of adjunct instructors (61 percent) at Seoul National University are women, and only 3.3 percent of female professors have leadership posts in universities (Diversity Council, 2017). Overall, female scholars in Korea are much more likely to work in irregular short-term contract positions than their male counterparts.

In the US, Korean graduate students in the humanities and social sciences show a higher return rate to their home country after graduation compared with those in the natural/physical sciences and engineering (Finn, 2014), because there are many US-born graduate students in this field and they have an edge over foreign-born graduates. Therefore, fewer international students are likely to have job opportunities in the US in such areas (Lee and Kim, 2010). In terms of locational patterns, in general, female scholars are geographically concentrated in large metropolitan areas as there are more positions available for them and their spouses (Kulis and Sicotte, 2002). In the case of Korea, both male and female scholars prefer to live in large cities, such as Seoul, for their children's educational opportunities and job prospects for themselves and/or their spouses (Kim and Yoon, 2017). However, limited job security and job opportunities for women—that is, women tend to access untenured or part-time jobs—create more precarious conditions for female scholars.

Methodology

This study focuses on Korean women who earned doctoral degrees in the humanities and social sciences, fields where Korean women outnumber men (National Research Foundation of Korea, 2015). The research used purposive and snowball sampling to obtain a sample of early-career postdoctoral women who finished their PhD studies in US universities and had relocated at least twice since graduation. Early-career scholars are more likely to relocate compared with senior ones (Kulis and Sicotte, 2002). It was difficult to find participants who met all the criteria. We initially collected the contact information of a few women who we already knew and then asked these individuals to provide the contact information for additional respondents.

In total, 14 participants who met the above criteria were chosen for in-depth interviews (Table 2). Of the 14, 10 interviewees held tenure-track positions, two worked as non-tenure track faculty, and one held a researcher position at a research institute. Seven interviewees were single, and the rest were married. Their ages ranged between the 30s and early 40s at the time of the interviews. We also collected population data for the cities where they live now. Half the interviewees returned to Korea permanently, and the rest remained in North America at the time of interviews in 2013–2015.

Table 2.

Background information on the 14 research participants.

Participant*	Marital status	Number of children	Age group	Academic area	Reason for the most recent relocation	Type of contract	Current country/ key feature of location
Ah-young	Single	None	30–35	Humanities	Job	Non-tenure track	US/ population over 0.5 million
Bo-young	Single	None	41–45	Social Sciences	Job	Tenure track	US/ population over 1 million
Da-jeong	Single	None	36–40	Social Sciences	Job	Tenure track	US/ population over 1 million
Eun-su	Single	None	30–35	Social Sciences	Job	Tenure track	US/ population under 30,000**
Gha-hee	Married	1	41–45	Humanities	Job	Tenure track	US/ population over 0.5 million
Hae-jun	Single	None	41–45	Social Sciences	Job	Tenure track	Canada/ population over 1 million
In-young	Married	None	36–40	Humanities	Family	Non-tenure track	Canada/ population over 1 million
Jung-ae	Single	None	36–40	Social Sciences	Family	Non-tenure track	S. Korea/ Seoul Metropolitan Area
Kyoung-hee	Married	1	36–40	Social Sciences	Family	Researcher (permanent position)	S. Korea/ Seoul Metropolitan Area
Mi-jin	Married	1	41–45	Social Sciences	Job	Tenure track	S. Korea/ Seoul Metropolitan Area
Na-young	Married	1	41–45	Social Sciences	Family	Tenure track	S. Korea/ Daejeon Metropolitan Area
Sun-ju	Married	1	36–40	Social Sciences	Family	Tenure track	S. Korea/ Seoul Metropolitan area
Tae-ran	Married	1	36–40	Social Sciences	Family	Tenure track	S. Korea/ Seoul Metropolitan area
Yun-gyoung	Married	None	41–45	Social Sciences	Family	Tenure track	S. Korea/ Seoul Metropolitan area

The names of the research participants have been anonymized.

In the case of Eun-su, this location refers to her place of work; she has opted to live in a larger city in the US.

We informed the participants of the purpose and background of the research before conducting the in-depth interviews. Once they agreed to participate, we scheduled the interviews at either their office or a coffee shop at their convenience. We conducted the face-to-face interviews in Korean, with an option to speak in English (the authors can communicate well in both English and Korean). All the interviews were audio-recorded with the participants' permission and were transcribed and coded by the authors to conduct a thematic analysis.

We used a semi-structured interview protocol to ensure that the interviewees were more open to the interview process. The interviews focused on their relocation choices and preferences and paid particular attention to the interviewees' feelings of inclusion and exclusion. The commonalities between the interviewees and the authors, such as gender, educational background and work experiences after graduation in the US and Korea, helped us better understand these female Korean scholars. Additional recruitment for interviewees stopped when we could not identify new themes from the completed interviews (Eriksson, 2015). Instead of adding new interviewees, we re-interviewed our participants to collect in-depth interview data. Each participant was interviewed two to four times, and the duration of the interviews varied from one to four hours. Pseudonyms are used to identify our interviewees in this paper.

We paid attention to pull and push factors on different geographical scales: national, cities in the host and home countries (neighborhood), and the individual/family level. Of the five interviewees who currently live in the US, four lived in cities with populations over 500,000 and one in a small town with a population under 30,000 when we conducted the interviews. Two scholars in Canada reside in Toronto, the largest city in the country. For those who returned to Korea, they settled in either the Seoul metropolitan area or the Daejeon metropolitan area as shown in Table 2.

Decision to study in the US

When the researchers asked the interviewees why they chose to obtain doctoral degrees, the interviewees explained three reasons on different scales (micro, meso and macro—global): family influences, limited opportunities for women in Korea and the reputation of American universities.

First, familial relationships affected the decision to pursue doctoral degrees in two different ways. Na-young revealed that her father was a traditional authoritarian Korean man.

The reasons I went to the US for my doctorate program were, first off, getting away from my (authoritarian) home and parents. So, I thought pursuing my degree in foreign countries like the US was the best way to live independently.

Na-young's motivation to study was to find a way to live independently from her family. Other interviewees, such as Mi-jin, had different motivations for leaving their home country.

Leaving Korea [for the PhD program] was not my decision. I left Korea and did my PhD because my husband decided to pursue his education [in the US].

Mi-jin was a tied-mover and had no choice when she moved to the US. In any case, their families' influence was an important motivation for the interviewees.

Second, the limited opportunities for Korean women compared with men in the workplace and the labor market in Korea led them to study abroad. Another interviewee, Ah-young, formerly employed in the tourism industry, explained that her job in tourism was not suitable for a long-term career. The majority of jobs in tourism require irregular working hours and are unstable, thus, this industry usually hires more women than men. Companies in the tourism industry regard women only as short-term labor and assume that women will quit their jobs following marriage. Furthermore, two other interviewees, Jung-ae and Eun-su, talked about their experiences as researchers at government-funded institutes in Korea. At that time, Jung-ae observed that only 5 percent of the tenure-track researchers were female, whereas most of the non-tenure track researchers were female. This was a significant moment in her decision to study and work abroad. Many Korean women realize that education does not guarantee equal opportunities to enter the labor market in Korea and that traditional gender roles have not changed in the society (Kim and Yoon, 2017).

Third, the research participants were fully aware of the merits of doctoral degrees from world-class universities. Because the majority of university professors in South Korea studied at American universities, the interviewees are familiar with academic theories from the US and eminent American scholars (Kim, 2011). For instance, half of the faculty members at Seoul National University hold doctoral degrees from American universities (Diversity Council, 2017). Therefore, many interviewees wanted to attend American universities for their doctoral degrees. Foreign (particularly American) doctoral degrees are valued more than domestic ones in hiring processes in Korea based on the ‘global stratification of higher education’ (Kim, 2016). Yun-gyoung, who obtained her master's degree in Korea, stated:

… I wanted to study more and chose a PhD program in a different country, because pursuing a graduate degree in a foreign country was booming among my peers in the graduate program in Korea at that time.

Because the majority of Korean faculty positions are held by those with foreign degrees, eminent Western scholars' influence in her field have encouraged many students to consider pursuing their higher degrees at world-class foreign universities. Another interviewee, Jung-ae, explained:

No one was trained fully as an expert in my specialty when I did my master's program in Korea. So I was eager to study the specialty in a country, the USA, where this specialty was rooted.

Holding a foreign doctoral degree means obtaining more specialized, up-to-date knowledge in the field to many Koreans such as Jung-ae.

Overall, a long history of female-unfriendly work environments and a gender-biased labor market in their home country pushed the interviewees to pursue their doctoral degrees in the US. In addition, the reputation and merits of American universities were attractive to the interviewees. They also expected that they would have better career opportunities by completing doctorates at world-class universities.

Factors and process of relocation decision-making

After completing their PhDs, our interviewees had three different career and locational options to choose from: (a) staying in the US with a work permit, (b) returning to Korea, or (c) moving to a different country. Their choices reflected multiple factors, such as job opportunities and familial relationships. There was no single factor that entirely determined their decisions. The decision-making occurred at two levels—country and region/city.

Choice of country

The decision to choose a country to live in began with a consideration of their family's and their spouse's/partner's locations and opinions. For the married interviewees, the spouse's location was the most important factor to consider. Long-distance relationships and living in a different country from their spouse were the least favored options for the married interviewees. Kyoung-hee, a returnee, stated:

To me, returning was predetermined when my husband went back to Korea for his job. When I began my doctoral program, my husband worked in a different city in the US. He returned to Korea permanently for a better position, and returning was the only option for me.

Kyoung-hee wanted to stay in academia; she took on her current position as a researcher at a local research center in Korea so that she and her husband could be together. For many of the married interviewees, like Kyoung-hee, their relocation was determined by the job offers their husbands accepted. In-young, who holds a non-tenure track faculty position in Canada, explained:

… my husband was the first to find a job in the city where we live right now. So, this forced me to find a job in the same city so that I can live with my husband. (I feel) that this is the fate of women.

When we interviewed In-young, her position at the university was as an adjunct faculty member. She was not satisfied with this temporary position because she felt that her current temporary position did not meet her parents' expectation. She explained that her parents expected her to have a successful career in academia, and her current situation made them less satisfied. However, she did not apply for jobs in different cities at the time of our interviews because she prioritized the couple's relationship over her career. In the case of Yun-gyoung, Sun-ju and Tae-ran, they had job offers before their husbands did, and when the latter received job offers elsewhere, their husbands migrated to where the jobs were. These couples lived separately for a couple of years, but the women eventually relocated to the cities where their husband worked.

Regardless of their country-level choices, family relationships influenced their migration trajectory, thereby limiting their mobility. Some interviewees (Kyoung-hee, Jung-ae, Tae-ran and Yun-gyoung) stated that they would have preferred to stay in the US to pursue their career, but family reasons prompted them to return to Korea after completing their studies in the US. Jung-ae, a single returnee, was concerned with limited opportunities of the academic labor market in Korea; however, her father's sudden death brought her back to Korea. She is the eldest child, and her obligation to the family changed her career plan of working at a prestigious American university. In deciding upon which country to live and work in, the interviewees considered career and economic conditions. But when these get in the way of familial relationships, the latter consideration became the deciding factor. Two single interviewees, Hae-jun and Bo-young, were the exceptions; they chose to remain overseas because they felt constrained by the conservative academic culture and limited job market in Korea. A progressive scholar, Hae-jun prioritized academic freedom and decided not to return to Korea. The rigid gendered hierarchy in Korean academia was another push factor for her.

Choice of region/city

Job availability was an important factor in choosing a region or city for both returnees and non-returnees. The location of their families was the most important factor in the case of some returnees. Some, such as Kyoung-hee and Jung-ae, decided to return without job offers. They applied for positions in the same city or within a commutable distance. In terms of location options, returnees had limited choices. When she was considering her job prospects in Korea, Sun-ju narrowed her job search to the Seoul metropolitan area, where her husband obtained a faculty position. At the time of our interview, Sun-ju was teaching at a American university and had remained in the US for some time while her husband had moved back to Korea. She stated:

I think it's okay to work at a university far from Seoul, like Gangwon province or a city which can be reached by a high-speed train. But my husband does not agree. Because now we live in different countries, he really wants to live together. So, I have limited choices on where to work in Korea.

Given the situation, geographic constraints hampered returnees' mobility within Korea. Kyoung-hee, a married returnee, attempted to convince potential employers during job interviews that she would move to where the job was located if she obtained the position. However, the interviewers did not believe her because they knew that her husband had a good position in her current location. Kyoung-hee stated:

Interviewers often asked about my husband's occupation and whether I can relocate or not during the job interview. (I think) my two conditions, being married and having a child, did not give a good impression to the interviewers. They thought I would work only for the short term and leave for another job soon after.

Some employers in Korea asked about the location of the applicants' families and their spouses' occupations in the job interview process. Married job applicants were asked about their spouses' backgrounds and their jobs. However, Kyoung-hee stated that this might only occur with female job applicants. In other words, many Koreans tend to consider that women's career is less important than that of their male counterparts.

In contrast, the interviewees who decided not to return to Korea considered the university and its location when applying for positions. For example, they had less preference for universities in the southern US, where they thought demographic and cultural diversity was low. Hae-jun explained that she and her friend, a woman of color, did not apply for jobs in regions with low demographic diversity. If they obtained more than one job offer, they were likely to choose the place with higher diversity and a more urban setting. Yun-gyoung, a former professor at a American university who had multiple job offers, stated that she preferred living in a large city. Yun-gyoung said:

The research-oriented university that offered me a job was located in a rural area. The university provided better conditions, for example, a research startup, but it (the location of the university) was too rural. I worried about the location of the university. Can I live in a small American town without my husband?

Her husband found a postdoctoral fellow position in a different city, and the couple could not move to the same location when she received multiple job offers. She was concerned that living in a small town with low diversity might be difficult for her without her family.

In addition to diversity, many interviewees preferred large-sized cities because they could provide better job opportunities for dual-career families. It was difficult, however, for couples to find tenure-track or stable positions in the same city for some interviewees (Yun-gyoung, Gha-hee and In-young). Although a long-distance relationship was the least favored option by the interviewees, it was the only option for some (Na-young, Sun-ju, Tae-ran, Mi-jin and Yun-gyoung). Unless they accept a non-tenure track position, it was difficult for Korean female scholars to obtain academic positions that satisfied familial relationships and the need for demographic and cultural diversity of locations regardless of the country in which they chose to live. Again, the interviewees considered multiple factors beyond the ‘diversity’ of a place, and their decisions were fluid. The reason is that some interviewees’ positions are not very favorable, for example, non-tenured temporary or non-academic positions. Overall, staying with their family was the most important factor to many interviewees.

Strategies to build and maintain their relations

City, neighborhood and workplace level

Returnees explained that some readjustment was necessary in both their work and personal life upon returning to Korea. Abroad, Koreans are more likely to live in large cities with high levels of demographic diversity, such as Los Angeles and Toronto, areas that they consider satisfactory in terms of diversity and livability (Yoon, 2016). Many interviewees were from Seoul, the largest metropolitan area of Korea, so they are more familiar with living in a city as they did in Korea. Hae-jun, a single person with a faculty job in Canada, stated:

As a single person, I really like living in my current neighborhood, which has cafés within walking distance near home, instead of in the suburbs. This kind of place is not boring…. This city (the city name) is favorable to professional immigrants like me. When I opened my bank account, they treated me differently after they knew my occupation. Professionals are welcome, and (I think) the male professionals might be more welcome.

Hae-jun's statement reflects the attraction of large cities, which offer a ‘diverse, vibrant, culturally cosmopolitan urban environment’ (Brown, 2015: 2350).

In many cases, diversity is interpreted in different ways by different interviewees. Some interviewees noted the advantages of living in a large city, such as co-location of multiple large universities in the same city or the convenience of living in a large city as a foreigner. However, they prioritized interacting with more Koreans in the city. A single interviewee, Da-jeong, elaborated on the advantages of living in a large city. She searched for Korean communities, such as book clubs, as soon as she received a job offer. Da-jeong has actively built networks with Korean single professional women in her age group in the city who share similar interests and hobbies, but worries about the rarity of opportunities to meet Korean men for romantic (or stable) relationships. Da-jeong stated:

It is difficult to find a significant other in the city. Interestingly, many single professional women live in this area, but many Korean men work in less skilled jobs here or they are students. I heard that other cities like San Francisco have more Korean male professionals… I feel more comfortable with other Koreans in terms of sharing the same Korean culture if I marry. This is not a language issue but a cultural one.

Although Da-jeong has been satisfied with her career, current institution and colleagues who are open to foreign-born scholars like her, she explained that she and her Korean women friends in the city are not very inclined toward international marriage. Another interviewee, Eun-su, who lives in a small southern American city, expressed mixed feelings about her current work environment and the town where she now lives. Her colleagues are friendly and nice to her, and the living expenses in the small college town are affordable to a single professional like her. However, the small pool of single men, regardless of their nationality and race, in her age group is a concern. Furthermore, she has very limited social networks in the small town. She stated:

I only contacted a couple of people in the town—a divorced female colleague in my department and a married Korean woman professor on campus. When it comes to this Korean professor, I rarely meet her because she is married and (I think) she is busy with working and childrearing.

The interviewees noted that they are rarities in the Korean community and that it is difficult to engage with other Korean immigrants in the areas where they live. Thus, Eun-su moved to a large city to meet other young Koreans and now commutes. Many single interviewees felt that they are isolated in both their local area and in academia. In the Korean migrant community, the family is an important unit of networking. Moreover, Jung-ae, a single returnee, revealed that single women in Korean academia are often considered as workers who can devote themselves to work and public service at their institutions and academic units. Jung-ae stated that her senior colleagues sometimes treated her as their graduate student, and did not consider her as a colleague or an independent scholar.

To married interviewees, such as Gha-hee, attending a local Korean church was a good way to meet other Korean immigrant families like hers. Gha-hee revealed that she wanted her daughter to have Korean friends through the Korean church and create a bond with local Korean people. Furthermore, the couple expect that her husband, a tied-mover, could work at Korean businesses through networking at the local Korean church.

The interviewees who stayed in the US and Canada endeavored to settle in new places as immigrants. Similarly, the returnees experienced readjustment processes in resettling back in Korea, particularly the gendered work environment and labor market. The gendered work culture has a long history and has not improved much, according to our interviewees’ experiences. Despite receiving a doctoral degree from prestigious US universities, the returnees struggled with the male-oriented work culture in Korea. Jung-ae stated that a male director of her former research institution preferred to work with men and used to socialize with other male workers for drinking and outdoor activities after work. In the Korean context, informal social gatherings in the workplace are critical for sharing information and for academic networking. However, these informal social gatherings occur mainly at bars or athletic events, such as golf games, and most women are reluctant to join them. Jung-ae experienced serious exclusion from this male-oriented work culture. In her next workplace, which was dominated by women, she felt more comfortable and more actively engaged with her colleagues in the workplace. Another returnee, Kyoung-hee, also revealed that her current boss at the research center is a woman. She stated: ‘That's how I got work here. If the boss were male, I would still be working as a part-time lecturer at different universities.’

The family level

Our interviewees in dual-career families often experienced difficulties in finding a work–life balance at the family level, especially if they had children. The married returnees (Mi-jin, Na-young, Sun-ju and Kyoung-hee) mentioned that childcare was primarily their responsibility. For example, Na-young stated, ‘My husband and I had the same board meeting of a certain academic association one day. Of course, my husband attended the meeting, but I couldn't. I had to stay with my kid at home that night.’ If they had schedule conflicts with their husbands, the interviewees said that they were expected to perform childcare because childrearing is mainly the woman's responsibility in Korea.

Sharing childrearing and housework were also the most difficult issues for married interviewees who stayed in the US. Sun-ju revealed that she was the first person who obtained a full-time position before she and her husband received their doctoral degrees at the same time when they lived in the US. While her husband was on the job market, she explained that she made great efforts to prevent her husband from feeling depressed. Thus, she did her best to share housework and childcare with her husband. However, her husband thought that he was far more devoted to doing housework than Sun-ju.

I happened to hear how my husband thought about housework and childrearing. He claimed that he did 90 percent of the housework and I did the rest, 10 percent. I thought he did 55 percent while I did 45.

Sun-ju thought that she and her husband had an equal relationship before she heard her husband's remark. She realized that her husband expected that housework and childcare are entirely her responsibilities. Other interviewees, such as Kyoung-hee, contracted out housework and childrearing to others outside her family. Kyoung-hee stated that she and her 24-hour stay-at-home nanny are in charge of childcare and household chores. She added:

I try to go back home for dinner with my kid. My husband comes home usually late during weekdays and he goes to work even on Saturdays. So, I and my nanny usually do the household chores and child care.

Before she found a full-time researcher position, she was a part-time instructor at a university; back then, her monthly teaching pay could not cover childcare and transportation expenses. Therefore, she had to search for a full-time position instead of staying in academia. Once the interviewees had made the decision on which country to reside in, they adjusted to their new environment.

In many cases, women in dual-career families assumed more responsibility for childrearing and housework, while their husbands were less active in these realms. To combine their career goals and family responsibilities, they resorted to either lowering their career goals or outsourcing childrearing and housework, including getting help from their parents. Our interviewees have to balance their career goals and childrearing responsibilities after they returned to Korea, because their husbands assumed less responsibility for childrearing and housework than when they were in the US. When they lived in the US, many dual-career couples shared housework and childrearing, but in Korea, gender roles in the family have not changed much, thus, women found it more difficult to pursue their career in the home country.

Conclusions

Our interviewees' gender and power relationships were not overcome or changed by their doctoral degrees. Rather, our interviewees were deeply embedded in their gender and social relationships at different geographic levels. For example, familial relationships were the top priority for Korean women scholars, rather than their careers. Therefore, their gender and social relationships forced them to negotiate and adjust themselves to keep the balance between their career and relationships. Their doctoral degrees may help them enter the labor market and obtain relevant positions after graduation; however, everyday practices in their households and workplaces continue to exclude them from the academic labor market in various ways. In addition, having a sense of belonging to a new place, or the home country in the case of returnees, was difficult for our interviewees. Therefore, they adopted various strategies to adjust everyday practices in the family, workplace and neighborhood arenas, and their post-migration experiences are dynamic. Furthermore, their relations and networks could lead to complicated outcomes in building and maintaining their relations, both career and personal.

At the country level, familial relationships were prioritized and their relations, such as their partner's career and family obligations, were considered. In the next stage of their choice of country, economic factors, such as job offers and career opportunities, became critical to the interviewees, but their job search was geographically limited. Given limited options to choose from, our interviewees have adopted strategies to build and maintain their social capital and networks in the post-migration period.

Their networks and social capital are complex, based on geographic level: family, workplace and neighborhood. First, their career-related network is embedded more in the people they meet and work with at their workplace who are open to foreign-born scholars like them, but their personal networks are different. Once in a new location, they were eager to build personal networks and social capital with other Koreans in their cities and neighborhoods, for themselves and their family. This locally embedded ethnic network can provide a sort of extended family in the local area, and friendship to our interviewees regardless of their marital status. Furthermore, this enables their partners to access jobs in ethnic businesses. Second, our interviewees struggled with their changed identities after studying and living in the US when they returned to Korea or relocated to a new place in the US or Canada. Gendered power relations within family or in their home country have not changed. Our interviewees had difficulties with the gendered everyday practices in their home country that pushed them to pursue doctoral degrees in the US in the first place. Furthermore, geographical context, gender-biased local culture, and inclusion and exclusion of certain groups of people are critical elements in understanding the migration and mobility of Korean women scholars. Our interviewees have negotiated their career aspirations with work–life balance, gendered workplace culture, their neighborhood and their family members.

In sum, this paper has examined Korean women scholars' various strategies to maintain their social relationships with others to explain the complexity of individual workers. Our study is empirical research that focuses on exploring the mobility of Korean women in academia in their early-career stages rather than providing a solid framework for generalization. Therefore, women scholars in other fields, such as natural sciences where male scholars are more dominant, or those in unstable positions, for example, temporary contract positions which female scholars are likely to hold, may result in a different gendered space. Future studies should continue exploring the complexity of individual workers' gender and social relationships over time.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We appreciate our 14 interviewees who shared their stories with us. We also thank Jin-Tae Hwang, Woonsup Choi and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2015S1A5A8017283).

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