After trying for more than a year to persuade more South Korean women to have babies, Chung Hyun-back says one reason stands out for his failure: “Our patriarchal culture.” Chung, who was tasked by the previous government with reversing the collapse in the country’s birth rate, knows firsthand how difficult it is to be a woman in South Korea. She chose her career path over getting married and having children. Like her, millions of young women have been collectively rejecting motherhood in a “birth strike.”
A 2022 survey found that more women than men — 65 percent to 48 percent — don’t want children. They are avoiding marriage altogether. The other term in South Korea for the birth strike is “marriage strike.”
The trend is killing South Korea. For three consecutive years, the country has recorded the lowest fertility rate in the world, with women of reproductive age having less than one child on average. She came to the “dead cross,” when deaths outnumbered births, in 2020, nearly a decade earlier than expected.
Now about half of the Country’s 228 cities, counties and districts are at risk of losing so many residents that they could be wiped out. Nurseries and kindergartens are being converted into homes for the elderly. OB clinics are closing and funeral homes are opening. At Seoksan Elementary School, in rural Gunwi County, the student body has dropped from 700 students to four.
Young Koreans have well-documented reasons for not starting a family, including the staggering costs of raising children, out-of-reach homes, dismal job prospects, and grueling work hours. But women in particular are fed up with the impossible expectations that this traditionalist society places on mothers.
President Yoon Suk-yeol, elected last year, has suggested that feminism is to blame for blocking “healthy relationships” between men and women. But he has it backwards—gender equality is the solution to falling birth rates. Many of the Korean women who turn their backs on dating, marriage and reproduction are fed up with widespread sexism and angry at a culture of violent chauvinism. Their refusal to be “baby-producing machines,” according to the protest banners, is retaliation. “The childbirth strike is women’s revenge against a society that imposes impossible burdens on us and doesn’t respect us,” said Jiny Kim, 30, a Seoul office worker.
Making life fairer and safer for women would do wonders to reduce the existential threat to the Country. However, Yoon’s conservative government advocates regressive policies that only magnify the problem.
Recent governments have been alarmed by a rate that appears to be approaching zero. Over the course of 16 years, 280 trillion won ($210 billion) has been invested in programs that encourage procreation, such as a monthly allowance for parents of newborns.
Many women still refuse. It is not surprising. There are few ways to escape stifling gender norms, whether it’s the pregnancy guidelines of laying out clean underwear for your husband before delivery, or monumental kitchen chores during holidays like the Chuseok harvest festival.
Married women shoulder the lion’s share of household chores and childcare, squeezing new mothers so much that many give up their career ambitions. Even in households where both spouses work, wives spend more than three hours a day on these tasks, compared to 54 minutes for their husbands. Discrimination against working mothers by employers is also common.
In one high-profile case, the number one maker of baby formula was accused of pressuring female employees to quit after becoming pregnant.
And gender-based violence is “shockingly widespread,” Human Rights Watch reports. In 2021, a woman was killed or targeted every 1.4 days or less, according to the Korean Women’s Hotline.
Women have organized stridently, from Asia’s most successful #MeToo movement to groups like “4B,” which translates to the “Four Don’ts: No Dating, No Sex, No Marriage and No Parenting.” The country’s feminist movements have achieved the decriminalization of abortion and tougher penalties for an epidemic of spycam-porn crimes.
However, many young Koreans have come forward as victims of women’s activism. President Yoon came to power last year by taking advantage of this resentment. He declared that structural sexism no longer exists in South Korea and promised harsher punishments for false reports of sexual assault.
The Yoon government is removing the term “gender equality” from school textbooks and has cut funding for programs to combat sexism.
The Government is also working to dismantle its own Ministry of Gender Equality. Established in 2001, it has been transformative by normalizing parental leave for fathers and helping more women reach higher positions in the workplace.
The comments of Kim Hyun-sook, Minister for Gender Equality in the Yoon Administration, illustrate his abandonment of women. In September, she rejected the idea that misogyny was at play when a Seoul subway worker stabbed a colleague to death in a subway bathroom after harassing her for years. Kim also initially stated that the rape and murder of a college student on a campus last June was not violence against women and should not be used to fuel “gender conflict.” So far, none of the measures implemented by successive governments have changed the trends in marriage and motherhood. Worse yet, the current government appears to be actively undermining the efforts that gave women hope.
“This is a historic regression,” said Chung, who was Minister for Gender Equality from 2017 to 2018. Society cannot end the birth strike without acknowledging women’s grievances, she says.
The UN projects that South Korea’s 51 million people will halve before the end of the century. The survival of the nation is at stake.
By: INTELLIGENCE/Hawon Jung
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6555829, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-02-02 22:10:05
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