Only 4% of unmarried Korean women think marriage, childbearing essential

A neonatal unit at a general hospital in Seoul in this file photo taken in 2019. Korea's total fertility rate fell to 0.78 last year, the lowest figure since the country began to collect relevant data in the 1970s. Yonhap

Gov't urged to fix housing, inequality issues to change trend

By Lee Hyo-jin

Just four percent of unmarried Korean women in their 20s and 30s see marriage and childbearing as essential in their lives, according to a recent survey that paints an even gloomier picture of the country's continuously falling fertility rate.

The survey was conducted by Park Jeong-min, a professor of social welfare at Seoul National University and published in the Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies, Sunday. Park surveyed 281 unmarried men and women aged between 20 and 40 on their thoughts about marriage and childbirth.

Only four percent of the female respondents agreed to a question asking whether “marriage and childbirth are an essential part of a woman's life,” while about 13 percent of male respondents believed so.

Also, over 53 percent of women agreed that “marriage and childbirth are not important in a woman's life,” compared to 26 percent of men who approved of the idea.

The survey's results reveal more about Korea's continuously falling birth rate.

According to the latest Statistics Korea data, the country's total fertility rate ― or the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime ― fell to 0.78 last year, the lowest figure since the country began to collect relevant data in the 1970s. The average total fertility rate of OECD member states was 1.59 as of 2020. Korea is the only OECD country with a fertility rate lower than one.

The rate is showing no signs of a rebound despite years-long government efforts to encourage couples to have more children. During the last 16 years, Korea spent roughly 280 trillion won ($210 billion) in response to the plummeting fertility rate.

Choi Seul-ki, a population policy expert at Korea Development Institute, sees the government's policies as having backfired. He said pushing young people to get married might have made them more skeptical about marriage.

“For a majority of young Koreans, tying the knot and having children are now considered a matter of choice, not social norms that they should follow. Rather than directly urging them to get married, the government should create an environment where marriage is an appealing choice to the young generation,” he said during a forum on demographic policies hosted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Feb. 22.

He urged the government to address the factors underpinning young people's reluctance to marry, such as the bleak employment rate, expensive housing, social inequality and the highly competitive nature of society.

Researchers in other countries seemed to be more pessimistic about Korea's demographic crisis. A Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) report published in 2021 concluded that there do not seem to be any groundbreaking measures available for Korea to increase the rate.

“Overall, there appears to be no obvious way for Korea's government to secure a fertility rebound through public spending,” read the report titled, “The pandemic's long reach: Korea's fiscal and fertility outlook.”

Higher levels of public social investments in daycare services in Korea would help, as would reductions in the private cost of higher education. But they are not likely to reverse the country's fertility slump, the report said.

According to the researchers, several immediate actions the government should take in the long term were: ending legal discrimination against children born out of wedlock or into non-traditional families; ensuring high levels of marriage-based inward migration are maintained; acknowledging that any near-term shift in fertility levels is unlikely; and thus commencing a structural adjustment to downsize Korea's early childcare and educational institutions accordingly.