More Korean parents now prefer daughters over sons

A newborn in a crib / gettyimages

Centuries-old preference for sons fades with some improvements in women's status and aging society

By Lee Hae-rin

Among younger parents planning to have children, there is a popular belief about how many children of a certain gender it is ideal to have. It goes that parents with two daughters are the most ideal, while those who have one daughter and one son are the second most ideal. Those who end up having two sons without any daughters are the least desirable, it goes.

Kim Yeon-ju, 30, a Gyeonggi Province-based office worker who has been on maternity leave since March said she fully agrees with this belief.

"I clearly see the trend that daughters are more preferred than sons, particularly among young couples who are planning to have a baby," she told The Korea Times, adding that she is one of the parents who prefers daughters over sons. "We younger mothers say that while growing up, boys become distant like strangers, and they just leave home once they get married and form a new family, as few of them share emotional interactions with their parents."

Every child should be a blessing. But, as the saying goes, daughters are pervasively more preferred than sons in Korea these days. According to a recent survey by Hankook Research which was conducted on over 1,000 people across the country, 55 percent think that "having a daughter is a must," while only 31 percent said that having boy is a must.

In the survey, daughters are preferred over boys by parents of all age groups, but the trend was especially remarkable among respondents over age 60. In that age group, 70 percent preferred girls, which is significantly higher than the 43 percent who prefer boys.

Korean parents preferring daughters over sons is an irony in that the country has been male-dominated for centuries, due to the emphasis on neo-Confucian values. Historically, mothers with daughters were encouraged to and even threatened to bear additional children to secure their family lineage through male descendants. Female family members were treated as second-class citizens who could take only limited part in filial duties including inheriting property, carrying on the family line, ancestral worship and supporting one's parents.

Since sex selection technology was introduced and became widely available in the 1970s and 1980s, the gender preference appeared more visible through female infanticide at birth, sharply raising the sex ratio at birth to 116 boys per 100 girls in 1990, whereas the natural average is 103 boys to 107 girls.

Seen is a neonatal unit at a hospital in Seoul in this file photo taken in February 2019. Korea Times file photo

However, Korea has overturned the gender preference and become "the first Asian country to reverse the trend in rising sex ratios at birth," according to a World Bank policy research paper from 2007.

The country's sex ratios at birth first reached the natural range of 103 to 107 boys per 100 girls in 2007, at 106.2, while the latest figure from 2020 is as low as 104.8 boys per 100 girls, it found.

The growing preference for daughters is remarkable in the adoption sector as well. The Ministry of Health and Welfare said that 65.4 percent of 260 domestically adopted children in 2020 were female.

"Korea is not only the first, but it is also the only country in the world to see a quick decline in son preference," said Cho Young-tae, a professor at Seoul National University's Graduate School of Public Health who specializes in demography and population profiling.

Cho explained that the reverse trend was partly due to the shifts in filial functions from sons to daughters.

"Normally, societies that have a strong and pervasive preference for sons tend to hold a strong belief in continuing the family lineage. But that has quickly disappeared in Korea, and older generations have changed to value their lives before death over the family's future," Cho said, explaining that sons no longer have the same degree of privilege over their functions as family members that they had in the past.

On the other hand, Korean parents have begun to be aware of the benefits of having daughters and come to rely on them in their sunset years.

The parent generations have learned through their experiences that daughters tend to make better emotional connections with parents and eagerly support their parents in their later years, Cho said. As a result, parents have grown more dependent on daughters, who are better candidates to take care of them when they are weak and old, especially as life expectancies have increased.

In this picture taken on May 3, children run across a barley field at Sangnim Park in Hamyang, South Gyeongsang Province. Yonhap

Compared to women's subordinated status in Korea historically, women's somewhat improved socio-economic status today is another reason behind daughters replacing sons in preference, Cho said. Women are less heavily dominated by their in-laws than they were in the past, while their parents-in-law now put less pressure on them to bear a son.

"Most of all, women who have survived the era of strong son preference in Korea from the 1980s and 1990s have now grown up to become the generation that gives birth and becomes parents. They know for themselves that having a son is not a must," Cho said.

Although daughters are favored over sons, however, the reversed preference for daughters doesn't necessarily mean women are equal to men, or that they have any kind of elevated social status.

"It reflects the social expectations and designated roles on women to do more household chores and emotional labor than men in the family," Lee Joo-hee, a professor of sociology at Ewha Womans University said.

According to Lee, daughters are more physically available to have more attachment and connections because they are 20 to 30 percent less involved in economic activities than men, while receiving social pressure to perform a higher level of emotional labor.

A Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) working paper on the gender disparity in Korea's labor market published in July highlights the gap in the female labor force driven by married women with children. The report points out the link between the labor market and fertility patterns, where many women fail to return to work after giving birth, whereas unmarried women with no children tend to remain employed more or less as men are.

"Compared to the past, thoughts of gender equity have become more popular and have influenced the decline of the preference for sons. However, preferring daughters over sons doesn't necessarily mean we have achieved gender equity," Lee said. "Instead, it's another form of sex discrimination, because daughters are preferred over sons for the same reasons sons were preferred over daughters in the past ― to have more functional value to them as a child."