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Nurses care for newborns in the maternity ward at a postpartum care facility in Seoul on Feb. 28, 2024. (Yonhap)

Since Korea’s backward labor market stubbornly refuses to allow workers to balance their work and family obligations, women continue to suffer a “childbirth penalty” that has a major impact on Korea’s plunging birth rate, a new study has found. It’s absurd to expect the birth rate to rebound as long as people’s careers are derailed by having children.

A report published by the Korea Development Institute on Tuesday included a comparison of the rate of career interruption among women with children and women without children. The career interruption rate among 30-something women without children fell sharply from 28% in 2015 to 9% in 2023, while among their peers with children, that rate declined more modestly over the same period (from 29% to 24%). The upshot is that women can substantially reduce the risk of career interruption by choosing not to have children.

Korea is the only OECD member state where the birth rate is less than one child per woman. The Korean birth rate has been dropping by about 0.07 each year since 2015 (1.24), falling to 0.72 last year. That’s quite different from the average birth rate among OECD member states over the same period (2015–2021), which has only decreased by about 0.017 births per year.

Researchers have focused on the fact that more women are opting not to have children as the childbirth penalty has increased along with women’s employment. That’s thought to account for around 40% of the decrease in the birth rate between 2013 and 2019.

Ultimately, it’s unreasonable to expect the birth rate to rebound as long as the burden of housework and child care falls on women. Until men and women can agree to split those responsibilities evenly, there’s little hope of altering a work culture of unlimited competition that’s basically predicated on not having children.

According to a survey of families held by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in 2023, the percentage of respondents who said the wife “mostly” or “generally” handles the housework was 73.3%, actually higher than in the survey three years before (70.5%). That has some significant implications for what the government’s fertility programs should focus on going forward.

Korea needs to encourage more fathers to make use of child care leave, considering that the rate here is lower than in other advanced economies. We need measures to increase the efficiency of childcare leave, such as making leave automatic. But before policymakers start churning out pro forma proposals, they need to seriously consider how the low birth rate is impacted by gender inequality.

President Yoon Suk-yeol’s fertility policy has been criticized for disregarding gender equality. We won’t get an effective prescription until we have an accurate diagnosis of the problem.

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