Outsider orbit: segmentation of employment trajectories and feminisation of outsiders in South Korea

This article examines the segmentation of the South Korean labour market based on workers’ employment trajectory patterns. Over the decades, labour market segmentation literature has explained labour market inequality by investigating non-competing segments that advantage certain workers over others–namely, insiders over outsiders. Nevertheless, despite increasingly diverse employment trajectories in post-industrialised societies, little is known about how the labour market is segmented when considering job mobility over time. Against this background, this article uses group-based multi-trajectory modelling on Korean Labor & Income Panel Study data to investigate labour market segmentation patterns based on long-term employment trajectories. Our findings reveal clear evidence of a segmented labour market, with three types of outsiders exhibiting distinct employment trajectories compared to two types of insiders, and married women being over-represented across all outsider trajectories. We argue that outsiders are trapped in ‘outsider orbits’, a structural barrier that limits women to outsider status in Korea.