ABSTRACT
South Korea’s corporations proudly showcase family-friendly CSR programs, gender initiatives, and glossy reports on “what we do for women,” yet the country remains near the bottom of global gender equality rankings. This paper asks how apparently progressive CSR, designed through global and Western logics, can inadvertently reinforce Confucian patriarchy. Drawing on collaborative autoethnography and dialogic interviews with 18 CSR and DEI practitioners, our research team of two Korean women and a racialized male ally holds up mirrors to one another and to our participants. We identify three mechanisms through which CSR perpetuates rather than transforms gendered hierarchies: the strategic substitution of “diversity” for “gender equality,” the reduction of gender politics to a “working mother’s issue,” and a “mission accomplished” complacency. We call this “harmony’s hidden wall” and argue that dismantling it requires structural, cultural, and epistemic unsettling of the very harmony that sustains inequality.