JiHye Jeong

JiHye is a journalist, writer, and gender equality specialist with nine years of experience in the media industry. As a journalist, she has focused on in-depth interviews, gender equality journalism, and columns on the realities of inequality. She currently writes for The Segye Times.

Jihye’s interest in feminism was sparked when as a journalist, she came face to face with the severe structural sexism in Korean society. She then began to look seriously at the issue of gender inequality through the lens of power and decided that the covert and entrenched system of gender discrimination in Korea, a country with one of the highest proportions of highly educated women in the world, needed to be investigated.

Recently, she has been working on exploring the phenomenon of the world's lowest fertility rate through the voice of Korean women. She also led an investigative reporting project, ‘Infanticide, the Expected Tragedy’ (2023), which explored the issue of infanticide by quantifying South Korea’s ‘ghost fathers’ who have abandoned their parental responsibilities, and a series of features, ‘Life After #MeToo’ (2020), which followed the lives of #MeToo accusers in Korea after they came forward. She was awarded the Gender Equality Media Award for her reporting on these projects.

JiHye writes articles and columns to document the lived experiences of sexual assault victims, women workers, and activists in order to make history. She writes a regular column on gender issues for the Journalists Association of Korea. Since 2020, she has also been writing a personal online column, ‘The Red Pill’, discussing current issues of inequality in Korea. As one of the many female/feminist journalists who have been subjected to cyber-attacks in Korea, she published a book ‘We Are All Guilty of Trolling’ (2023)’, based on her experiences.

As a feminist journalist and author, JiHye has worked to maximise opportunities for women to speak up for themselves, particularly those who often face social discrimination. In 2021, she hosted an all-female panel debate show called ‘Speak Up, Ladies’, aimed at empowering women in the male-dominated online environment. JiHye is also interested in women's empowerment and founded the Gender Editor Training Group to explore gender equality journalism. In the long term, she plans to dedicate herself to writing and running a space focused on girls’ education and expanding women’s social networks.