A Photo Of All The Leaders At HYBE Labels Draws Negative Attention

This article is part of our coverage of HYBE vs. ADOR CEO Min Hee Jin. You can read more and view the entire timeline here.

The ongoing feud between HYBE Labels and ADOR CEO Min Hee Jin has brought to light a lot of problems within the company, which has made many fans’ opinions of HYBE become poor. While it seems many K-Pop fans think that both parties in the feud are at fault to some degree, there are still a lot of people who sympathize with Min Hee Jin for the position that she’s found herself in.

It has also brought to attention another aspect of HYBE Labels that netizens are finding disappointing at best, and downright disturbing at worst.

On a public forum, a user shared a collage of all of the top executives at HYBE (apart from Min Hee Jin). It turns out that they’re all middle-aged men, with some people commenting on how they even look kind of similar to each other.

These are the executives that appeared in HYBE’s 2021 company explainer video, which even at the time was criticized for being all men. The label has drawn additional criticism for the wage gap between male and female employees, which is allegedly 76 million won (around $55,000 USD) compared to 51 million won (about $40,000 USD) — the largest wage gap in the industry.

A few days ago, we covered the particularly disturbing history of one of the men, Park Ji Won. Previously a part of Nexon Korea, he was the former COO before moving on to becoming the CEO. Nexon Korea is a game publishing company, and one of the games that Ji Won was involved with — Sudden Attack 2 — came under fire for extreme sexualization of the female characters. It was so extreme, in fact, that the game was banned.

[Hot search] Netizens dig into HYBE CEO Park Jiwon’s past and bring back his controversy surrounding a video game that was launched by Nexon Korea when he was the representative director of Nexon. The game was banned due to over sexualization of the game’s main female characters. pic.twitter.com/93lefI61Tn

— Weibo Melons 🍉 (@weibomelons) April 27, 2024

It has people questioning his and the other executives’ intentions as leaders at HYBE Labels, especially when it comes to their girl groups and female artists. A majority of the fandoms of most of their artists are also girls and women, and the money they spend will mostly end up in these older men’s pockets.

Here’s what Korean netizens are saying about this realization.

“It’s frustrating just to look at the pictures.”
“No, but most of the consumers are women, so how are they going to read the trends?”
“It’s f*cking bleak.”
“Don’t write lyrics that talk about your dreams and hopes from now on, I’m going to boycott you anyway.”
“It’s f*cking the worst.”
“It’s disgusting.”
“It’s really disgusting and disgusting that all the women’s money goes into their pockets. I wonder how many talented women like Min Hee Jin have been stepped on and kicked out.”
“It’s true that there are a lot of women in both consumers and workers, but only men are at the top.”
“That creepy feeling like seeing a picture of the White House with only white people..”
“Just looking at the pictures makes me frustrated…….”

International fans are also disturbed by the situation.