Jung Ye-eun, a pseudonym for a woman in her late twenties, started working as a mid-career employee at a small company in Seoul at the end of 2023. While managing accounting duties, she noticed that her male colleague, who joined the same time as her, was classified as a 6th-grade employee while she was designated as a 7th-grade employee, resulting in a monthly wage gap of over 800,000 won. Given that the company has less than 100 employees and a relatively simple wage structure, she initially found it difficult to think of reasons other than gender bias for this discrepancy. Her certainty about gender discrimination increased when she later learned that a new male employee joining their team was immediately assigned to the 6th tier.