The Economic Implications Of Gender Divisions In South Korea

Few places in the world are experiencing a more intense political division between men and women, especially among young adults, than South Korea, which has perhaps the most potent political movement of angry "incel" (involuntarily celibate) men.

This fairly new and visible political development is buried in a context of deep gender divisions in a society that has rushed towards the future and redefined roles for men and women (and dramatically reduced numbers of children per woman per lifetime to the lowest number in the world) in basically a single generation.

Korea has among the highest rates of women entering colleges and universities in the world, despite the fact that in Korea, unlike Europe, higher education isn't free or even heavily subsidized. As Tyler Cowen explains at Marginal Revolution:

One reason why the Seoul dining scene still has so many nooks and crannies

There are so many places with dishes you’ve never tried before. And they are deep into alleyways, or on the second or third floors of retail establishments. In these places I never see people take out their cameras and photograph the food. The establishments are not “very on-line,” as they say.

More likely than not, a large troupe(s) of middle-aged and older men suddenly come out of nowhere, and descend upon these eateries for dining and intense bouts of conversation. The men don’t seem to want too many other people to know about their special hangouts. English-language menus are hard to come by. . . .

Korea is an especially sexually segregated society, all the more relative to its high per capita income. And so these restaurants are boys’ clubs of a sort, as much private as public. Might that be one reason why the small restaurant food scene here has stayed so undercover?

As is often the case, Japanese and Korean cultural trends don't repeat each other but they rhyme.

Both societies have seen dramatic declines to global lows in the number of children born per woman per lifetime (which is called somewhat confusingly the "Total Fertility Rate" or TFR).

In both societies, only a very small proportion of children are born to unmarried mothers (low single digit percentages).

In both societies, unmarried, childless women can have a near parity in economic prospects in the paid work force with men of similar age, education and abilities, but workplaces are far less friendly to married women with children, upon whom a heavy childcare and eldercare burden rests. Also, in both societies, full time permanent jobs carry a significant expectation that you will spend a lot of time on non-work activities like after work drinking, with co-workers.

Both societies, despite surging rates of college attendance, attach significantly less stigma to pursuing a life path that doesn't involve a college education than the U.S. does.

Both societies have seen dramatic improvements in nutrition and health over the last generation resulting in each new cohort of young adults growing taller than the one that came before them, and with significant shares of these younger cohorts of adults, for whom a well defined path of societal expectations proves hard to live up to also experiencing significant alienation from the "good, respectable" path in life, in which the "Turn on, tune in, drop out" counterculture-era phrase popularized by Timothy Leary in the U.S. in 1966 still resonates notwithstanding the fact that overall these societies are extraordinarily well behaved and conformist by international standards.

Both societies are busy rewriting the scripts of daily life, for example, in marriage rituals. 

In Japan, young people try to balance traditional Japanese customs, Western traditions (which are Christian influenced in a society where only a small minority of people identify exclusively as Christian), and innovations that their own generation and the previous one have designed on their own. 

In Korea, the most Christian country in Asia, some of the new scripts involve figuring out how to integrate Christianity into a traditionally Confucian society in which Christians are a large and growing, but still not a dominant subculture within the society.

In both societies, the proportion of people who are foreign born is small, it is not considered offensive to officially emphasize the nation's racial homogeneity, and people with foreign origins even if they were born there and are fully assimilated are viewed with a certain level of distrust, despite the fact that neither South Korea, nor Japan, is an insular society at this point isolated from the rest of the world. Both societies, for example, are heavily influenced by U.S. culture and mandate the teaching of English to every student in school (although, as in the U.S., the amount of functional proficiency that students acquire from this exercise is often underwhelming).

No one can predict with any confidence what will emerge from this unstable and dynamically evolving process of reshaping gender roles in these societies.