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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWomen in South Korea Are on Strike Against Being 'Baby-Making Machines'. lowest fertility in world
Many women still say nope. No wonder. Theres little escaping suffocating gender norms, whether in pregnancy guidelines to arrange clean undergarments for your husband before labor, or the dayslong kitchen drudgework for holidays like the Chuseok harvest festival. Married women are saddled with the lions share of chores and child care, squeezing new mothers so much that many give up professional ambitions. Even in dual-income households, wives daily spend more than three hours on these tasks versus their husbands 54 minutes.
Discrimination against working mothers by employers is also absurdly common. In one notorious case, the countrys top baby formula maker was accused of pressuring female employees to quit after getting pregnant.
And gender-based violence is shockingly widespread, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2021, a woman was murdered or targeted for murder every 1.4 days or less, according to the Korea Womens Hotline. Women have dubbed the act of ending a relationship without getting a vicious reaction a safe breakup.
But women havent passively accepted the toxic masculinity. Theyve organized raucously, from Asias most successful #MeToo movement to groups like 4B, which translates to the Four nos: no dating, no sex, no marriage and no child-rearing. The countrys feminist movements have won the decriminalization of abortion and harsher penalties for an epidemic of spycam-porn crimes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/opinion/south-korea-fertility-rate-feminism.html
South Koreas demographic crisis was once inconceivable: As late as the 1960s, women had six children on average. But the state, pursuing economic development, carried out an aggressive population control campaign. In about 20 years, women were having fewer than the 2.1 children needed for replenishment, a number thats only continued to drop. The latest available data from South Koreas statistics agency put the fertility rate at 0.81 for 2021; by the third quarter of 2022 it was 0.79.
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the government has removed mentions of sexism from education books and is dismantling women's empowerment ministry
sounds like DeSantis
Diamond_Dog
(31,669 posts)crickets
(25,896 posts)Very thought-provoking article. Just as in the US, many in the South Korean government are trying to turn the clock back for women. It's a grave and costly mistake.
betsuni
(25,136 posts)BigmanPigman
(51,432 posts)do is more like 20 minutes but they actually think they are working 5 hours. The US is very similar. Males are sharing more of the household chores than their fathers did but it still is not even close to what their female counterparts work. They think they are doing twice the work than what they are actually doing. And of course they want applause, applause and more applause for being so wonderful and forward thinking.