For gender-neutral national defense

How conscription promotes gender inequality

By Koo Won-Mo

“Hacksaw Ridge,” a 2016 Hollywood movie, depicted the heroic story of Desmond Doss, an American combat medic who singlehandedly rescued 75 men in one of the deadliest battles in World War II ― all without carrying a weapon.

Doss didn't let his religion as a Seventh-Day Adventist get in the way of serving his country. He became the only conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the United States.

Doss would not have received such an honorable recognition in South Korea.

All able-bodied South Korean men from 18 to 35 are subject to mandatory military service. The Korean authority has rejected one's freedom of thought, conscience, or religion as justifiable reasons for refusing military service. It has imprisoned more than 19,300 conscious objectors ― more than the rest of the world combined ― since the end of the Korean War in 1953, according to Amnesty International.

The situation changed in June when the Constitutional Court ruled an article of the Military Service Act unconstitutional because it failed to provide conscientious objectors with an alternative service of a civilian nature. The ruling marked a landmark step toward allowing everyone equal opportunities to fulfill his constitutional duty of national defense in a manner consistent with his beliefs.

Furthermore, on Nov. 1, the Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that recognizes religious and conscientious beliefs as valid reasons for refusing mandatory military service. This is the first time the highest court has respected conscientious objection as a constitutional right in line with freedom of conscience.

Yet, South Korea does not grant such equal opportunities to a substantial portion of its population ― women.

Given the significance of national defense as a constitutional duty of all citizens and the government's past hard-line stance against conscientious objectors, it is peculiar that half the population is entirely exempt from conscription.

Most arguments against the conscription of women, even that of the Constitutional Court in 2014, rest on the difference in physical capacity between genders. Disqualifying someone from the duty of national defense simply based on his or her physical capacity, however, is myopic at best.

Many military posts do not require much physical strength as modern warfare relies heavily on advanced technologies. Besides, alternative service now being devised for conscientious objectors suggests that national defense is not necessarily limited to military activities.

Then why should the burden of national defense, which benefits everyone, fall entirely on men?

Proponents of universal conscription argue that the current system is unfair for men especially because it involves significant sacrifices at an individual level ― two years of disrupted college education and delayed professional career. But the current conscription is actually unfair for women because it perpetuates the centuries-long patriarchy and reinforces the deep-rooted gender inequality in South Korea.

South Korea is largely a Confucian society. Confucianism teaches women's obedience toward men as a virtue. While archaic even by South Korean standards, Confucian patriarchal values remain deeply entrenched in South Korean society.

Conscription perpetuates these values by serving as a sacred rite of passage for men. “Boys become men after serving in the military” is a popular maxim. While it is intended as benign encouragement for conscripts, it implicitly promotes the idea that men earn their rights in the society only by serving in the military ― military patriarchy at its height.

Men who serve in the military often feel a sense of entitlement. This can be beneficial as it can lead to a greater civic engagement. The problem is that it has an unintended consequence of ostracizing non-participants.

“You just don't know because you haven't served” is a line commonly used by South Korean men to disregard their female peers in a range of social settings including workplaces. The sense of entitlement leads to a false sense of superiority, which in turn strengthens the existing patriarchy.

When the #MeToo movement took hold in South Korea earlier this year, many women came forward with their stories of sexual misconduct by men. The movement quickly escalated to a broader gender war sparking fierce online debates around gender equality. Many of these debates, however, reached a deadlock when the issue of conscription was brought up.

For some men, the burden of conscription even entitled them to silence women over the grave issues of gender-based violence.

Expanding the duty of national defense to include women cannot instantly solve these problems, but it will be a critical first step toward achieving greater gender equality in South Korea.

In 2016, Norway expanded its conscription to include women, not because it needed more conscripts but because it aimed to improve gender equality. In 2017, Sweden followed suit by introducing universal conscription.

These are testaments to the underlying social norms of gender equality in Norway and Sweden, which were ranked second and fifth most gender-equal countries in the 2017 Global Gender Gap Report published by the World Economic Forum. South Korea was ranked 118th.

There will be challenges in implementing a gender-neutral national defense. It will take time. But having women as equal partners to men in national defense is crucial to advancing our views toward women's role in our society.

We must start by working toward a societal consensus on universal conscription. If one's belief should not come in the way of serving one's country, neither should one's gender.

Koo Won-Mo is a graduate student in public policy at Harvard University with a deep interest in the national defense issues of South Korea. He served as an aide to the South Korean minister of national defense during his three-plus years as an Air Force officer.