Essays on Gender Inequality in Creative Industries

Gender inequality in accessing economic opportunities remains a significant problem in society. This dissertation focuses on gender inequality in creative industries, which feature labor and product market characteristics distinct from the corporate context, a setting that has been extensively used to study gender inequality in prior literature. Several unique characteristics of creative industries, including the use of project-based organizing and a substantial ambiguity in evaluating talents, are known to amplify the challenges that women face in advancing their careers and mobilizing resources to bring their ideas to life. Against this backdrop, this dissertation aims to address key issues that play a significant role in understanding gender inequality in creative industries, through three studies conducted in the Korean film industry. Essay 1 focuses on the “big fish versus big pond” dilemma in career choices, where individuals face a trade-off between the size of the entity they work for (i.e., large or small team, project, and organization) and the role they play within the entity (i.e., leader or follower) and examines how these career choices – accumulating small project leader or large project follower experiences – can have gendered impacts on enabling career advancement. Essay 2 examines how digitization alters the creative producers’ reliance on gatekeepers, who decide which products are produced and ultimately reach the market, thereby affecting the representation of women creative producers across the production and exhibition stages. Essay 3 focuses on the issue of producer-product gender (mis)match and explores what drives creative producers to create products that feature protagonists of the opposite gender, what costs such actions incur, and what strategies producers use to mitigate potential penalties caused by such incongruence. As a whole, the three essays contribute to the literature on gender and creative industries and provide implications for practitioners.