Female leads in K-Dramas: navigating between personal and professional life Premium

There is a seemingly conscious writing choice in several mainstream K-Dramas, especially those centred around romance — a woman’s career and ambition are not sidelined in favour of the romance and the ensuing drama

In a scene from the 2019 K-Drama,  Her Private Life, Sung Duk-Mi (played by Park Min-Young) and her boyfriend Ryan Gold (played by Kim Jae-Wook) have an early morning conversation about art and their childhoods.

“Although I failed to become an artist, at least I became a person who hangs up paintings at a gallery,” says Duk-Mi, a chief curator at a private museum. Gold, an artist, is quick to notice the dismissive tone and points out the importance of what Duk-Mi does. “Nowadays we don’t go to an exhibition and see a piece of art directly. What we see is a concept of what a curator perceives as art,” he says, quoting Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher.

Her Private Life is not a deeply philosophical show; on the contrary, it is a breezy, romantic comedy filled with the tropes we associate with most feel-good K-Dramas. There’s a childhood connection, temporary memory loss, a grumpy male lead with a heart of gold, and a warm female lead. But a lot of screen time is used to show Duk-Mi’s life as a curator and her love for art. Over the course of the show, she tracks down a reclusive artist, curates a celebrity exhibition, and puts up with the whims of her difficult boss. In the meantime, she meets Gold and falls head-over-heels in love.

This is a seemingly conscious writing choice in several mainstream K-Dramas, especially those centred around romance — a woman’s career and ambition are not sidelined in favour of the romance and the ensuing drama.

These K-Dramas enable us to immerse ourselves in the lives of women who are museum curators, weather forecasters, taekwondo champions-turned-webtoon editors, reality show producers, journalists, screenwriters, rebellious entrepreneurs, or even regular office workers.

For a long time, mainstream films, especially rom-coms, have sacrificed the ambitions of working women at the altar of romance. Women’s ambitions have often been ridiculed. And the more they are shown to grow in their careers, the harder it becomes for them to find a significant other. If they are not pursuing a glamorous profession, even less is shown about what a day in the life of the female lead looks like. We hardly get to know anything about her responsibilities or work friends, and even less about the possible gender-related difficulties she faces at the workplace.

Park Min-Young plays a weather forecaster in the K-Drama,  Forecasting Love and Weather, which released earlier this year.  The writing is in fact compelling in the parts which focus on how she tackles her professional challenges and lacks lustre in the portions on the romance. Such a deep dive into the life of a weather forecaster, let alone a woman forecaster, is rare in any rom-com.