Female secretaries slam sexist game

A female secretary character in a mobile game “Everybody’s Management,” is identified by her age and glamorous body. / Courtesy of Korean Association of Administrative Professionals

By Kim Se-jeong

A representative group of female secretaries has accused a local games company of including a sexist portrayal of women in their profession within one of its games.

The Korean Association of Administrative Professionals (KAAP), a private organization with 10,000 members, recently sent a letter to mobile game developer Efun Company, bashing it for its depiction of women in its “Everybody’s Management” title.

The game has proven popular since it was released earlier this month, with each player acting as an executive at a company and given the opportunity to hire one male and three female secretaries.

The secretary characters come with short introductions. While the male characters are introduced based on their performance level and competitiveness, the female characters are introduced only by their appearance. The female secretaries also use suggestive language when they speak with their boss, such as, “Do you like something hot?” or “I guarantee you’ll be satisfied with me.”

“The game is an insult to almost 260,000 women working as secretaries in Korea,” said Lee Min-kyung, the president of the KAAP. “Secretaries in this game are portrayed as nothing but beautiful women with no expertise in what they do. But that’s not true.”

She said secretaries are professionals, but the game is based on an anachronism, providing a distorted image about secretaries to younger gamers.

“If the company does not change the content, we’ll take more serious action,” she said.

Following the group’s protest, Efun Company chose to address the issue. It said it is changing the game to have greater gender equality, removing controversial elements from the game.

Besides this game, the KAAP said there is a huge amount of online content that is insulting to female secretaries.

“We are planning to send letters of protest to Daum and Naver, the two largest portal sites, that show a lot of lewd images of women when you search for an image of a ‘secretary,’” Lee said. “We will demand the website operators delete these images from their search engines.”

It is not new for female secretaries to have been portrayed in such a manner. There has been a widespread belief that the secretary is a job for women, and they get the jobs not because of their performance or ability but because of their appearance.