Viewing the digital economy through rose-coloured Lenses

Entering any municipal-funded community centre (also called ‘cultural centres’) in South Korea, one can easily find advertisements encouraging citizens to learn a new musical instrument, sport, or language at affordable prices. In recent years, however, the bulletin boards have been patched with new flyers that read: ‘Achieve your entrepreneurial dream at our new female entrepreneur platform! One-on-one consulting sessions’ or ‘Mompreneur business academy: Grand opening!’ specifically targeting young mothers. In the private sector, companies such as Facebook Korea have partnered with Korea's leading women's universities to implement internship opportunities to nurture female entrepreneurs (Cho, 2016) and have launched the ‘#shemeansbusiness’ programme that offers digital marketing and networking tips to female business owners (Kim, 2016). The increasing number of millennial women engaging in self-employment through online micro-entrepreneurship has been praised by governments and corporations around the world as a ‘movement away from bureaucratic, male-dominated work structures’ through which women can enjoy lifestyles ‘where passion and profit meld’ (Duffy and Pruchniewska, 2017: 844). Women have been especially impacted by the growing trend of ‘working for yourself ‘ (Taylor, 2015: 176), as they are enticed by the flexibility of working independently, a situation that helps them manage the dual roles of full-time employee and caretaker at home (177).

South Korea boasts of its leadership in successfully integrating the digital into governance, education and daily life, and has recently implemented various governmental and corporate initiatives encouraging female labour participation through the use of digital media technologies. Yet, it ranks 118 out of 144 countries in terms of women's ‘economic participation and opportunity’ and ‘political empowerment’, making it one of the lowest-scoring countries in Asia and well below the global average, ranking lower than countries such as Cambodia and Senegal (World Economic Forum, 2017: 11). Women hold a meagre 2 per cent of senior management positions, which is only one tenth of the average of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. As women face challenges being rehired at corporations after leaving work for childbirth in their 30s, many miss ‘a decade or more of prime working life’ and resort to parttime jobs, never reaching ‘the next rung on the career ladder’ (Lagarde, 2017: para. 12).