Gender Discrimination and Worker and Student Health in Marketized Schools (Dec. 2024)
Min Choi, MD, Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Translated by Cheonghee Yu
Reviewed by Joe DiGangi
Korea Institute of Labor Safety and Health
On November 5, 2024, the Incheon Metropolitan Office of Education held a forum and roundtable discussion on preventing deepfake damage, attended by approximately 100 students, parents, and others. In the commemorative photo provided by the Incheon Office of Education, participants hold signs shaped like shields bearing words like ‘Respect,’ ‘Consideration,’ ‘Love,’ ‘Prevention,’ and ‘Truth.’ Terms like sexual violence, gender-based violence, or gender equality are nowhere to be found.[1]
Kim Soo-jin of Outbox, an elementary school gender equality teachers’ group, who participated in an emergency discussion on eradicating deepfakes held on September 5, 2024, pointed out that precisely this kind of scene illustrates how this problem has been allowed to grow.
In a violence prevention video for elementary students uploaded to the Digital Crime Prevention Education Platform <D-CL> by the Korea Institute for Gender Equality Education and Promotion, a male student edits another boy’s photo into a gag image and posts it on a community forum without consent. Upon his friend expressing displeasure, he realizes his mistake and apologizes. Only after his friend expresses discomfort does he realize his mistake and apologize. School violence prevention education does not address sexual violence. It only covers social networking service (SNS) etiquette like consent and respect. It does not explain why the majority of sexual crime victims are women, or that digital sexual crimes are gender-based violence. While classrooms could not even call sexual crimes by their name, teachers believed hiding phone numbers and not including photos in yearbooks was the best they could do.[2]
This is our starting point. Acknowledging that schools have long been spaces where gender discrimination and sexual violence have become normalized, and that some of the people learning and working there have suffered stress and trauma, sometimes causing significant long-term harm to their health. Only by facing the problem head-on can we determine how to take the next step.
Why schools?
Why and how have schools maintained an environment where gender discrimination and sexual violence have become normalized? Compared to 20 or 30 years ago, gender stereotypes have weakened considerably, and nowadays, female students are also being forced to embrace the ‘equal’ pressure of exam results above all else. Researchers argue that despite some progress, the marketized public education system since the 1990s, must be investigated as the reason schools remain spaces of sexual violence and gender inequality.
Historically, public education has served capitalism by supplying the labor force needed for the job market, while also performing the function of preserving the political value of equality, realizing distributive justice, and preventing social polarization. However, political agendas like community, equality, and human rights cannot be fully reconciled with market order. The current situation in which the public school system is collapsing is the eruption of these internal contradictions within public education.
For instance, ‘meritocracy’—one of the values public education champions—operates on the premise of a labor market that assumes the ideal individual and standard worker is male. This perspective obscures the inequalities already formed by the labor market’s gender-discriminatory structure and various lines of domination and division. It conveniently omits the entrenched gender wage gap, speaking as if goods are distributed solely based on ability.
Thus, meritocracy prevents us from seeing beyond the structure, treats movements to change unequal structures as subversive, and addresses everyone as ‘individuals,’ preventing them from standing as political subjects. Meritocracy justifies being ranked and distributed within the current patriarchal capitalist system, and schools that teach this become institutional devices that make capitalism and sexism appear fair.[3]
Within this marketized education system, sexual differences are defined solely by anatomical distinctions between men and women. There is no space for reflection on how biological differences have been socially and historically constructed. Sex education centers on understanding biological and anatomical knowledge. In this context, the difference between men and women fails to carry meaning beyond that of male and female.[4]
In sex education, girls’ bodies are defined solely as vessels for pregnancy and childbirth, while men’s aggressive sexual impulses are still interpreted as instinctive and natural. Current sex education fails to name sexual violence as such and denies opportunities for historical and social reflection on gender. Such ‘sex education’ is not a failure of sex education, but rather the ‘normal state’ of sex education achievable within public education under capitalism.
In this sense, schools function not merely as passive reflectors of society’s gender relations or as tools for maintaining existing gender structures, but as active mechanisms that actively arrange gender relations within an unequal framework.[5]
School workers are no exception
When schools are seen as institutions that actively perpetuate unequal gender relations, not only students but also workers within the school are exposed to structures of gender discrimination and sexual violence. In 2021, a principal at an elementary school in Anyang city was arrested after secretly installing a small camera in the female teachers’ restroom. In February 2024, it belatedly came to light that a teacher at a high school in South Jeolla Province had sexually harassed and assaulted another teacher. According to local women’s groups, the school’s Sexual Harassment Review Committee only ruled on the sexual harassment, declining to take a position on the assault, citing the ongoing police investigation. The principal attempted to cover up the incident but became involved in a violent altercation. He also transferred not only the perpetrator but also several victimized female teachers to other schools.
Schools are also a world where occupational segregation by gender is starkly evident. In 2017, a member of the National Assembly Lee Eon-joo (then of the People Power Party, now of the Democratic Party) faced public backlash after telling a reporter inquiring about her stance on the strike by non-regular school workers, “Why should we regularize the women who cook meals?” Beyond school meal workers, approximately 90% of all non-regular school workers are women.
Female non-regular school workers experience various forms of discrimination including verbal abuse, surveillance, and exclusion from school administrators and regular teachers. They are forced to perceive their problems as inevitable phenomena that marginalized groups in South Korean society – “ women” and “non-regular workers” – must endure. This undervaluation of female non-regular workers within the broader non-regular workforce reinforces distinctions within the working class and deepens inequality even among non-regular workers themselves.[6]
The health of those who have experienced gender discrimination and sexual violence
It stands to reason that the health and quality of life of school members experiencing gender discrimination and violence cannot be good. As early as 20 years ago in 2004, a study of 583 middle and high school students found that most forms of school-based sexual violence—including sexual harassment, obscene materials and phone calls, sexual assault, and rape—were closely linked to mental health issues such as somatic symptoms, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and anxiety. This correlation was evident in both male and female students.[7] Experiencing sexual violence as a youth can leave long-term consequences and hinder psychosocial development. Multiple studies have also revealed that experiencing sexual violence directly or indirectly influences suicidal thoughts and behaviors.[8]
Discrimination, like direct violence, leaves scars on the bodies and minds of those who experience it. Experiences of discrimination impact health through two primary pathways. Discrimination can cause stress, leading to health-risk behaviors like smoking or drinking. As a direct response to stress, various physical reactions may occur, such as increased secretion of stress hormones, heightened sympathetic nervous system activity, elevated blood pressure or blood sugar, increased arousal, sweating, and increased heart rate. If these reactions persist or recur, the risk of various diseases increases, including obesity, heart disease, hypertension, and musculoskeletal disorders.[9]
Reexamining school workers’ health issues through a gender lens
In 2022, a middle school teacher in Jeju conducted a lesson urging students not to engage in hatred or discrimination against social minorities. Some parents and organizations visited the school to protest, citing content about sexual minorities included in the lesson, and demanded the removal of displayed lesson materials. All fellow teachers at the school issued a statement supporting the teacher. In the statement, they said, “This incident has made teachers afraid. We are even more afraid that students will not receive proper education.”
Over 10 years of exposure to cooking fumes (toxic vapors emitted during food preparation) in school cafeterias caused lung cancer, and all 100 cases recognized as occupational diseases to date have occurred in women. The School Cafeteria Lung Cancer Countermeasure Committee pointed out that during the Korea Workers’ Compensation & Welfare Service’s occupational disease investigation process, they ask about ‘frequency and extent of cooking at home’ – a question not posed to other workers with lung cancer. This highlights how lung cancer among school cafeteria workers is a deeply ‘gendered’ occupational disease.
Beyond merely reflecting societal gender discrimination, workers’ health in schools—which actively produce discrimination and violence—cannot be separated from the issue of gender equality.
References
[1] Yonhap News Agency (2024) 인천시교육청, 딥페이크 피해예방 포럼 및 원탁토론회 개최 [Incheon Metropolitan Office of Education Holds Forum and Roundtable Discussion on Preventing Deepfake Damage] November 6, 2024, https://www.yna.co.kr/view/RPR20241106007200353
[2] Kim Su-jin (2024) 딥페이크 사태를 마주한 한 초등 교사의 발언, 딥페이크 성폭력
박멸을 위한 긴급토론회 [Society Resembles the Classroom: An Elementary School Teacher’s Statement in the Face of the Deepfake Crisis, Proceedings of the Emergency Symposium to Eradicate Deepfake Sexual Violence]
[3] Eom Hye-jin (2021) 성차별은 어떻게 ‘공정’이 되는가?: 페미니즘의 능력주의 비판 기획 [How Does Sexism Become ‘Fair’?: Feminism’s Critique of Meritocracy Project], Economy and Society 132: 47-79 DOI : 10.18207/criso.2021..132.47
[4] Eom Hye-jin, Kim Seo-hwa (2020) 공교육의 시장화와 ‘성평등’: 가해자/피해자, 정상군/관심군, 그리고 수컷/암컷 이분법에 기반한 시민성 개발 [School Education System and Gender Equality: Developing Civility Based upon Binaries of ‘Offender/Victim’, ‘Normal Group/Concerned Group’, and ‘Male/Female’], Korean Women’s Studies 36: 1-39 DOI: 10.30719/JKWS.2020.06.36.2.110.30719/JKWS.2020.06.36.2.1
[5] ibid
[6] Yoon Min-jae (2013) 학교 비정규직 여성노동자에 대한 차별과 배제의 연구 [A Study on Discrimination and Exclusion Against Female Non-Regular Workers in Schools], Social Science Research 21:144-184 https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/landing/article.kci?arti_id=ART001750795
[7] Kim Hye-won, Jang Myeong-sim (2004) 청소년들의 교내 성폭력 경험과 정신건강의 관계: 성별에 따른 비교 [The Relationship Between Adolescents’ Experiences of School Sexual Violence and Mental Health: A Gender Comparison], Journal of the Future Youth Studies Association, 1:125-149
[8] Yeom Dong-moon, Cho Hye-jeong (2021) 청소년의 성폭력 피해경험이 자살생각에 미치는 영향: 우울과 자아존중감의 조절된 매개효과를 중심으로 [The Effect of Adolescents’ Experiences of Sexual Violence on Suicidal Thoughts: Focusing on the Moderated Mediating Effects of Depression and Self-Esteem], Korean Journal of Youth Studies 32: 33-55 DOI 10.14816/sky.2021.32.1.33
https://www.dbpia.co.kr/journal/articleDetail?nodeId=NODE10533216
[9] Son In-seo, Kim Seung-seop (2015) 한국의 차별경험과 건강 연구에 대한 체계적 문헌고찰 [A Systematic Review of Research on Discrimination Experiences and Health in Korea], Health and Social Welfare Review 35: 26-57 https://www.kihasa.re.kr/hswr/assets/pdf/849/journal-35-1-26.pdf
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