She walks into a room full of conservative power elites donning an Arabic scarf around her neck and red Converse sneakers.

She describes progressive presidential candidates Moon Jae-in and Ahn Cheol-soo as “great figures who should take up key government posts and do important things,” and calls herself a billionaire liberal but says that people should not rely on government to create jobs.

Kim Sung-joo, the chairwoman and CEO of Sungjoo Group and MCM Holdings AG, who was recently tapped to co-chair the conservative Saenuri Party’s central election committee, is an unusual brand of feminist.

“I want male reporters to ask me a question,” Kim, 56, said in a casual meeting with reporters at a coffeehouse in Seoul last week. “I love men.”

When the host of the event tried to prevent a 30-something male reporter from a liberal-leaning newspaper from prodding her with difficult questions, Kim stopped the host, saying how much she loved the paper. She talked about stories she had read in the paper about kids who fell victim to school violence. The reporter blushed and quickly bowed his head.

Kim’s rugged individualism and spontaneous outbursts have attracted attention in recent days ― and not all of it favorable.

“Come closer and take the picture, I love ‘young-gae,’” she told a group of male campaign officials in their early 40s last Wednesday, using a Korean word that literally means young chicken but is more commonly used as a euphemism for young men and women in their sexual prime.

The Democratic United Party accused her of sexual harassment. Kim apologized on Monday, saying that she was referring to young minds and added that she had habitually used the word at her company. The last remark generated even more controversy and accusations of workplace sexual harassment.

“I joined the party as a wild horse,” she said at the meeting where she made her young-gae remark, foreshadowing the controversy that was to ensue. “To breathe life into this quiet party, I keep running around making trouble.”

Kim was recruited to co-chair the presidential campaign for Saenuri Party’s Rep. Park Geun-hye in early October. The owner of a luxury fashion brand who stays in the U.S. and Europe most of the year, she is a seasoned businesswoman but a complete novice in politics.

Park’s surprising choice of Kim ― who has never been elected to public office or run a political campaign ― to take the helm of her presidential campaign was widely seen as a move to woo female voters as well as young voters in their 20s and 30s. Over the years, Kim has built up an international profile and a self-made image despite her family background.

Kim was born into a chaebol family three years after the end of the Korean War. Her family owned Daesung Co., an energy company. She was raised in a palatial house with more than 10 maids. But the world she grew up in was a traditional patriarchal Korean household where sons were trained to eventually succeed the family business and daughters were groomed to marry into other chaebol families.

From an early age, she resisted the gender barriers that were thrust upon her. In a school-wide midterm exam in middle school, she came first in her class. 

“I proudly presented my report card to my parents,” she said in a TV interview. “They didn’t appear happy at all. They said that it’s difficult to marry off a smart girl.”

After earning a degree in theology and sociology at Yonsei University, Kim traveled to the U.S. in 1979, the year that Park’s father, President Park Chung-hee, was assassinated. She earned another undergraduate degree at Amherst, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts.

“I asked myself: why can’t women marry the way they want and have the job they want?” she said. “Wherever I went, I received first-class treatment, sitting at royal boxes at musical performances. I wondered: do I have to live such a boring life even after I get married?”

After earning degrees from two elite colleges, Kim worked as a store clerk at Bloomingdale’s, an upscale department store in New York, packing clothes and working inventory. She earned less than $200 a month.

“There was no ‘I’ in the life I lived. I was always someone’s daughter, then someone’s wife, and then someone’s mother. It was just like the life portrayed in ‘Une Vie,’” she said, referring to a 19th century novel by the French writer Guy de Maupassant that details the miserable life of a woman from an aristocratic family.

After returning to South Korea, she founded her own fashion company. She was a new face and a rare female personality in Korea’s business world, which was dominated by men and a culture of late-night schmoozing at room salons. But she succeeded.

Kim was selected one of the 1997 Global Leaders of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and also is among the Top 50 Women to Watch by The Wall Street Journal in 2004.

But her lack of political acumen and predilection for spontaneous outbursts have earned her mixed support. In 2010, she declared that women should also serve in the military in order to become strong and to develop leadership skills.

“In the West, women are very diligent and hard-working. But in Korea, at lunch time, I often see many wealthy women just hanging out at luxury hotels,” she quipped at a meeting of business leaders.

She has drawn fire in recent days when she declared that rushing economic democratization would work against the tide of history, which countered Park’s campaign pledge to push for economic democratization.

“Young people should not sit idly and ask the government to create jobs for them,” she told reporters.

Last week, she apologized for her remarks at her party’s headquarters, saying that they had been ill-considered and that she “doesn’t know politics too well.”

But on Wednesday, she was back to her flamboyant form, wearing her signature scarf and sneakers ― both in red, the color of revolution.

By Samuel Songhoon Lee (songhoon@heraldcorp.com)