SEOUL — A café owner served Minkyung a persimmon cake stuffed with soft cheese, a seasonal Korean favorite. The 40-year-old is a regular at the café, where she comes for the quietness and warm atmosphere. “Boss, have you ever heard of someone having a lot of kids to get government money?,” Minkyung asks the owner and his wife behind the counter.
In 2023, South Korea’s fertility rate fell to 0.72, well below one child per family, among the world’s lowest, and an all-time low for the industrialized Asian nation. To stimulate births, the government has increased subsidies for parents, but the decline persists.
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Her answer distills the thoughts of many Korean women — it’s not children per se they resist, it’s “having children.”
Minkyung puts it this way: “With a child, there’s a change of priorities in your life and a certain level of sacrifice … and I’m not sure that’s acceptable for me.”
Lower incomes, extreme life stress, and unaffordable housing have made low birth rates a common phenomenon in many developed countries.
But the change has been particularly drastic in South Korea. In just 60 years, from 1960 to 2020, South Korea’s fertility rate has plummeted from 6 to 0.8. “In Korea,” Minkyung noted, “you go shopping on the street and you won’t see any little kids at all.”
While the South Korean government was nervous and invested heavily in subsidies to boost births it was, unable to slow the decline. In March 2023, President Yoon Seok-yul declared that the low fertility rate was a crucial issue for the country and that he wanted to find out why the stimulus policy was failing.
Scholars and demographers have been alarmed by the changes in South Korea. The Center for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimates that South Korea’s population will halve to 26.8 million people in the year 2100.
No kids zone
Minkyung moved to the Los Angeles in 2010 for her master’s degree, and five years later returned to her home country, where she now works as a video artist whose work centers around the themes of female identity and desire.
Talking about children, Minkyung remembers her African dance teacher sharing about life back home. The teacher talked about how in the local villages, everyone knows each other, and the children live their lives freely among each other. If parents were not available to watch their children, the neighbors would take the children out to play.
Negative attitudes toward children have increased.
But in Korea, it’s the opposite. Some of her friends who have had children tell her that they are afraid to take their young children out at all, sending them to daycare centers and hiding them in separate, isolated spaces in a building because the parents feel unsupported by society.
“There is definitely a culture in Korea where children are not welcome in society,” she said.
In 2012, a restaurant customer accidentally scalded a child, the mother criticized the restaurant on the Internet, and the restaurant owner was later fined. But the public blamed the incident on the mother’s failure to watch over her child. Since then, negative attitudes toward children have increased — restaurants and other public places have set up “no kids zones,” where children are literally not allowed to enter.
Social exclusion
Although the National Human Rights Commission of Korea ruled in 2017 that no kids zones violated the right to equality, the phenomenon has not stopped. In 2022, a poll by the Korea Research Center showed that 73% of respondents supported the establishment of no kids zones. According to estimates by the think tank Je Institute, there are about 500 no kids zones in South Korea.
“It’s very difficult to have a social life with children, and you become an object of hate,” Li Jiaxian, a 32-year-old sex education lecturer who visits elementary and middle schools from time to time to teach gender lessons to students.
On NATE, a South Korean online discussion forum, one female college student posted a message: “I hate children so much,” which received thousands of likes.
What women really need is maternity leave and the right not to be fired from their jobs after giving birth.
Today’s society puts limits on children, but mothers endure the same fate. Li Jiaxian says that the “no kids zone” is also a “no mother zone,” prohibiting not only children, but also mothers who are exhausted from taking care of their children and want to take a break.
In May 2023, Yong Hye-in, a 33-year-old South Korean legislator, brought her two-year-old son to the National Assembly to speak about her commitment to repealing no-mother zones. Two years earlier, she had just given birth to a baby and was suffering from postpartum depression. When she tried to go to a coffee shop with her family to take a break, she was refused entry.
Workplace stress
Because of their children, South Korean mothers need to accept certain corners of society where they are unwelcome, while also being bound by older social norms and family expectations.
Still what really worries young mothers is that childbearing will be a burden on them in the labor market, notes Kim Hye-mi, a 29-year-old politician. Not having children? “It feels like air,” Kim says with a light nod of her head. Over the past decade or so, the government has spent a lot of money subsidizing women to have and raise children, “But what women really need is maternity leave and the right not to be fired from their jobs after giving birth.”
On April 9, Statistics Korea released data showing that the number of women in the workplace reached 9,976,000 in 2023, a record high since the statistics were compiled. However, the gender pay gap in Korea is still as high as 31.2%, ranking first among OECD member countries for the 26th consecutive year and 2.6 times higher than the average of 12.1%.
Juggling work and family
Women’s fear of losing their jobs begins the moment they are interviewed. Kim Hye-mi said that even now, women are still being asked “Do you plan to have children?” and “Do you plan to go abroad?”.
Although Korean law states that if a female employee is fired for being married and pregnant, the employer can face five years in prison or a fine of up to 36 million won (,460) in fines. But Kim Hye-mi points out that even when women who have been discriminated against have filed complaints with the Human Rights Commission or even the courts, they still haven’t received a fair verdict. In 2017, four executives at KB Kookmin Bank, one of South Korea’s top three banks, were charged with violating the Equal Employment Act for deliberately changing the scores of 112 female applicants to a lower score — but in the end, they were only fined ,500 by the court.
Li Jiaxian pointed out that society is putting the responsibility of care only on mothers, who have to manage the pulls of both the family and workplace.
“How is it possible for women to juggle work and family at the same time when they only have one body?” Kim Hye-mi asks.
As a result, South Korean women’s labor force participation rate peaks at nearly 80% between the ages of 25 and 29, but drops after 30. Men, on the other hand, have had a labor participation rate of over 90% from age 30 until age 54. It is worth noting that Korean women between the ages of 25 and 34 are the most educated cohort among OECD countries, but in the end, between the workplace and the family, they find it impossible to juggle the two, so they give up childbearing.
Maternity leave reform
Increasingly, South Korean women are choosing to remain single, and more than half of South Korean women under the age of 40 are single, according to 2021 data from Statistics Korea. For the first time ever, there are more single people than married people.
The same is true for men. 50.8 percent of Korean men under the age of 40 are single, and when asked why they don’t want to get married, many say it’s for economic reasons — to buy a house in Seoul, one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets, a man must work for 18.5 years without spending any money, according to the Korea Economic Research Institute.
The childcare subsidy of 0 a month is very low, with the cost of childcare alone close to ,000.
For Martin, 37, who works for a large corporation in South Korea, buying a home and raising a child is also a difficult task. He earns ,700 a month and his wife earns ,400, for a total monthly income of ,100. “It’s not a small income, but it’s a tough situation with a baby,” Martin said.
He calculates that he has to pay a monthly installment of ,600 to buy a house in Seoul, and the childcare subsidy of 0 a month is very low, with the cost of childcare alone is close to ,000.
South Korea needs a clear set of fertility policy measures, experts say, from maternity leave to workplace support, to an educational support system for women returning to work.
Japan, whose fertility rate is also lower than 1.4, provides a wealth of policy support to balance women’s work and childcare, and offers public resources such as free state nurseries, after-school care, and preschool education.
Kim Hye-mi stresses that a society in which no children are born is an unsustainable society, and she believes that government officials should focus on policies that have a real impact on women.
However, even if South Korea achieves 100% of its fertility policy objectives, it may not be able to overcome the trend of low fertility rates in the short term. From economic development to social norms to gender inequality, the current low fertility rate is a result of various structural factors that have accumulated over the years. Even with comprehensive policy reforms, it will be difficult for South Korea’s fertility rate to recover to the level of more than 30 years ago in the short term.
