South Korean women have called for the freedom to dress as they choose after a newsreader caused an uproar for appearing on air without a bra, the latest bid in a feminism movement that has grown in the male-dominated country.

Yim Hyun Ju faced criticism after she appeared on air on a TV program braless this month and took to social media to share her experience with a hashtag #nobra.

It came as a small but growing number of women in South Korea choose not to wear a bra in public in a bid to reject traditional social norms and push for gender equality.

"It's all about breaking out of the box," said Yim, who has worked for one of South Korea's biggest broadcasters, MBC, since 2013.

"Many things that we considered natural in the past were a repression of women's rights," the 35-year-old told Thomson Reuters.

From abandoning makeup to rejecting marriage, a burgeoning feminist movement has gained ground in recent years in South Korea, which ranked 108 out of 153 countries on the World Economic Forum's 2020 Global Gender Gap Index.

The movement was sparked by thousands of women who took to the streets in 2018 against an epidemic of "spycam porn" and has gathered pace in other areas in the socially conservative Asian nation since then.

This includes a rising number of young women who have given up makeup or cut their hair short to rebel against society's long-held ideals of beauty in a country with one of the world's highest rates of plastic surgery per capita.

Yim herself made headlines in 2018 after she broke taboos on local TV by going on air wearing glasses- an issue that also sparked an outcry in Japan last year after some firms had imposed bans on female staff wearing glasses.

"Wearing glasses and not wearing a bra are all about choice," said Yim, who previously appeared on a television show about new challenges that featured three men wearing bras and three women - including Yim - who went braless for a day.

One of South Korea's best-known K-pop stars, Sulli, was vocal proponent of not wearing a bra in public, sparking headlines.

She took her own life in October after cyber bullying.

In 2018, a group of young Korean feminists protested after their topless photos on Facebook to highlight women's rights were removed. Facebook later reinstated the photos.

"It's absurd that in 2020 we have to say out loud that it's our right to not wear a bra in public," said Jiann Woo, 25, a theater director in Seoul and the co-founder of a local feminist group.

"I feel natural and comfortable since I stopped wearing it since four years ago."

Yim Hyun Ju is fighting to give South Korean women a choice. Reuters

Korean women fight for the right to go braless