page_title: Jangmadang
section_title: Changing gender roles in North Korean society
hierarchical_section_title: Jangmadang / Changing gender roles in North Korean society
caption_attribution_description: This woman was preparing some food in the square! After I did this picture, she immediately ran away.
context_page_description: Jangmadang, Korean for 'market grounds', are the North Korean farmers' markets, local markets and black markets. Since the North Korean famine, they have formed a large informal economy. Since the 1990s, the government has become more lenient towards them; however, merchants still face heavy regulations. Currently a majority of North Koreans are dependent on markets for their survival.
  The North Korean government has tried to regulate growth of the market economy in North Korea with a variety of methods. Some of them such as regulating the age of traders has caused some societal changes such as making women more responsible for earning money for their families. This has resulted in changing gender roles in North Korean society.
  There have been speculations on the possible role of black markets in causing reforms of the North Korean government and its economy, as happened in China.
context_section_description: During the North Korean famine, people received and shared help first in their local community through organizations, workplaces, relatives and neighbors. These networks for assistance and barter were based on existing solidarity and trust. It has been reported that even women's organizations, such as elderly women's association, were able to give help. The initial barter networks developed into early makeshift marketplaces. However, many of the originally existing mutual-help relations strained and broke up later on.
  Married women and elderly women with married children and grandchildren, played the most active role in the early mutual-help arrangements and the birth of marketplaces. North Korea human rights reporter Barbara Demick called these women "mothers of invention". These women were the ones to take risk of traveling great distances, and going to find food from countryside, or even from other provinces despite regulations against human mobility. The local administration in provinces which had suffered food shortages in the 1980s, was tolerant on the actions people took to survive. These women also defied regulations against unauthorized goods transactions, and some crossed the dangerous border to China as temporary migrants, to take the role of family's breadwinner.
  Historically in North Korea the man has been seen as a head of the family, and provider for family's livelihood, but with collapse of the North Korean economy, the men have been forced to stay in their workplaces even if they can not work in a non-functioning factory. As it has become impossible to live with monthly salary anymore, the role of the provider has increasingly fallen for women to do. A married woman can be registered as a full-time housewife giving freedom to trade. Men have to pay to the factory management for the same unofficial privilege. However, women's relative freedom has allowed some men to stay in market life to earn money. As men take care of the wholesale and transportation, the women take care of the actual selling of the goods on marketplaces. According to Andrei Lankov, remarkably the women dominate North Korean economy on the lower levels. The women engage not only in trade, but on small scale household production making shoes, sewing garments and preparing food for sale.
caption: Role of the North Korean women has been changing with growth of the markets.
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