by Roseann Lake
Matsui explained that the government has also encouraged greater transparency and target setting with regards to female workforce employment by encouraging companies with more than three hundred employees to disclose their numbers of women in positions of leadership. “Companies are not legally required to do this,” notes Matsui, “but in a homogenous society like Japan, where there is high pressure to conform, it could work.”
An antiquated tax law that discourages married women from fully participating in the workforce by offering a dependent exemption to anyone—usually a man—whose spouse does not earn more than $9,500 per year, has also been revised. Instead of 1.03 million yen, the threshold for claiming the exemption has been raised to 1.5 million yen, or almost $14,000. Although a nice gesture, it’s a woefully inadequate move for a country with a very large and highly skilled population of women.
After Japan was defeated in World War II and became occupied by the Allied Forces, there was a shift from a feudal system that largely restricted women to the home, to a more modern system. As the country was demilitarized and democratized, women over the age of twenty were granted suffrage, and regulations preventing women from receiving higher education were removed. Starting in 1949, more than three hundred coeducational universities were established—or upgraded from being single-sex non-degree-granting institutions of higher learning—and two national women’s universities were also minted in the cities of Tokyo and Nara. According to statistics from the Japanese Ministry of Education, between 1960 and 1980, the proportion of four-year female university students increased from 2.5 percent to 12.3 percent, and between 1990 and 2000, it more than doubled, from 15 percent to 31 percent. Today, 45.6 percent of Japanese women attend university, as compared with 54 percent of their male peers.
When attempting to make sense of these numbers, it’s important to consider that in Japan, higher education for women isn’t necessarily meant to lead to a high salary or a lofty career. “It’s a bit like the US in the 1950s,” explained Akiko Yoshida, the author of the study referenced earlier. “Education is a means to meet future middle-class husbands, or to get an ‘Mrs. degree.’ ” She mentioned anecdotal cases of girls she knew of in the ’80s who studied in prestigious two-year colleges, as this increased their chances of getting clerical jobs in Japan’s best companies. Although they didn’t take these jobs with the exclusive aim of meeting a desirable salaryman to marry—and Japanese parents don’t explicitly push their daughters to become educated for the purpose of being considered more “wifely” (that is, capable of managing a home and helping to educate children)—this was considered the ideal trajectory for “smart” girls.
Although this culture is no longer as pronounced, the ideal of a homemaker wife still exists. My good friend Manya Koetse, a Sinologist and editor in chief of What’s on Weibo—a highly recommended news website that reports the latest trends on the Chinese equivalent of the Twittersphere—went to high school in Japan in the early 2000s. She told me about her best friend, Kumiko—an English teacher who ended up marrying a man who lived in a town five hours away from her family. Kumiko had no friends or job in her husband’s town, so she took up a cooking and home economics class that it seems many girls take when they get married. “It’s unbelievable,” said Manya. “Ten years ago, the girls I went to school with were smoking cigarettes and working as miniskirt-wearing drinking girls in Osaka bars, and now on Facebook and Instagram they’re posting pictures of the perfect food they make their husbands.” Making bento boxes for her husband (and children) is in fact such an important duty of the Japanese wife, it’s also part of how some women communicate with their spouses. There are reports of Shikaeshi Bento, or “revenge lunchboxes” in which wives express their displeasure with their husbands through a creative culinary language. Some wives cut messages out of seaweed strips (, the character for “idiot,” for example) and delicately place them over a bed of rice, while others choose to punish their mates through less than palatable food combinations, such as a raw egg, a heaping serving of plain yellow corn (have fun eating that with chopsticks!) or an indigestion-inducing bento full of sour pickled plums known as umeboshi.
Given the persistence of traditional gender roles, it’s no surprise that career-oriented women in Japan are often criticized for being kawai-kunai or “unfeminine,” and face difficulties when searching for a partner. Many of them want to marry, reiterates Yoshida, but for lack of exposure to the types of partners they seek—it’s worth noting that Japanese men, in part due to their intense work schedules, are consistently ranked at the bottom of global indexes on how much husbands contribute to household chores—they remain single.
I mention Japan because in many ways, it serves as a cautionary tale for China. Like Japan, China passed through a period of being considered an “economic miracle” and is now entering a phase of slower growth, albeit as the result of different circumstances. After years of being the factory of the world, China is attempting to shift its economy away from dependence on heavy industry and cheap exports. This is because labor costs have risen in China, leading corporations to seek out more cost-effective options in countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand, but also because Chinese leaders are keen for their country to make more sophisticated contributions to the global economy.
Accordingly, China has already begun its pivot toward a more knowledge-driven export model. But in order for it to succeed, it needs the support of its entire population. This was true during its boom years—when the push for urbanization moved millions of rural residents into more urban areas, where they took on the manufacturing jobs that became the key drivers of the country’s economic growth—and it is even truer now because quality matters more than quantity. Economic growth is no longer strictly a numbers game; it’s increasingly about talent, human capital, and productive, income-generating members of society with enough buying power to stimulate domestic consumption.
When evaluating who might be best positioned to help carry China forward, it becomes clear that the country’s young, well-educated women are an indispensable part of its future. Channeling their full economic engagement—which includes allowing them to reach their educational and professional potential, without fear that either of these things will jeopardize their chances at marriage or doom them to a sorry life of singlehood—is not only a social imperative; it’s an economic necessity.
Many of Japan’s current economic and demographic woes can be traced back to its failure to fully engage its women in the formal economy. Even today, only 44 percent of women are employed in the full-time sector, according to numbers published by the Japanese Ministry of International Affairs and Communications. Research from Goldman Sachs indicates that if Japanese women were employed at a rate equal to that of their male peers, Japan’s GDP could grow by 13 percent, thereby significantly lessening the pressure imposed by a shrinking population. But the story doesn’t end here.
In South Korea, a never-married woman in her thirties or older who has received at least a four-year college education, has her own career, and earns a higher than average yearly income, is known as a “Gold Miss.” While this term is softer on the ears than “leftover woman” or “New Year’s noodles,” it represents an equally significant population of Korean women who have not tied the knot. While many of their reasons for remaining single overlap with those of Chinese and Japanese women—increased access to education, the lack of a desire to forego careers and become homemakers—the consequences of their decision to remain unmarried are also the same.
Like Japan, Korea is on the verge of a demographic crisis. By 2026, 10.7 million Koreans—or more than 20 percent of the population—will be sixty-five or older. As is true in Japan, an increasingly smaller workforce is being squeezed to support a growing elderly population, which, as the result of advances in health care, is also enjoying greater longevity and therefore requiring resources for a longer period of time. Meanwhile, Korea’s population has just begun to shrink,
and according to a highly futuristic simulation commissioned by the National Assembly in Seoul, Koreans risk becoming extinct by the year 2750. The country’s economic boom years—which occurred in the 1970s through the ’90s, less than a decade behind Japan’s—are over, GDP growth is hovering around a lackluster 2.5 percent, and with few other options for keeping the population ticking, Korea’s government is desperate for its people to make some babies.
Less than fifty years ago, Korea was in a very different situation. After the end of the Korean War, South Korea witnessed a baby boom that put further strains on an already desperate economy. The United States encouraged Korea to limit its population growth, which it dutifully did. IUD insertions and sterilizations were carried out in roving clinics that the US Agency for International Development helped to fund, through the donation of reconditioned army vehicles. There were even cases of forced sterilizations and abortions, as reported in Mara Hvistendahl’s chilling book, Unnatural Selection. As was true in China, they were paid on a per-procedure basis, providing family planners with great incentive to ensure that population controls were being met.
By 1970, the total fertility rate per woman in Korea dropped to 4.71, down from 6.33 in the 1950s. In 1980, the number was further reduced to 2.92; which was around the same time a gender imbalance began to emerge. As it turns out, South Korea was no less immune than China to the Confucian values system that inculcates a cultural preference for sons.
In the 1980s, Korea’s new military leader, Chun Doo-hwan, realized that population control was a pretty good business. It had already been the source of a considerable amount of foreign aid, and he was keen to pursue more of it. “Even Two Is a Lot” appeared as the new slogan on a fleet of mobile clinics funded by a $30 million loan from the World Bank, while millions more in aid came from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. As a result of this more restrictive measure—which was not a law, but a stern suggestion—the gender imbalance continued to climb. By 1990, Korea’s gender imbalance was the highest in the world—116 boys for every 100 girls born. It held on to this record until 2004, when China—in its most imbalanced year—saw the birth of 121 boys for every 100 girls.
Astonishingly, by the year 2000, Korea’s sex ratio at birth made a turnaround, and by 2007, it was back to normal. “South Korea is the only country in modern history to have a highly-abnormal birth ratio and then to reduce that number to fall within normal ratios,” writes Hvistendahl. It took a remarkable effort in terms of public-awareness campaigns that promoted the equal value of both male and female offspring, but it also helped that Korean parents could see that it was true. As economic growth helped erode inequalities between the sexes—in terms of their access to education and the labor market—Korean parents became more willing to birth and raise a girl, because it no longer seemed like such a bad deal.
Although the fertility rate is back on track, the imbalances of previous generations are still working their way through society. Between 1980 and 1984, 25 percent more men were born than women of the same age, and for children born in the ’90s, that rate is even higher. Unsurprisingly, these imbalances have contributed to a population of leftover men, 1 in 7 of whom is estimated to be unable to find a partner.
Since the imbalance is smaller and more contained—in China, that same figure is 1 in 5 of a much larger population of men—the Koreans have been able to more easily mitigate the effects of the imbalance. Still, the leftover men in both countries share many of the same characteristics. As is true in China, Korean leftover men are overwhelmingly located in the country’s most rural areas. In cities, the sex ratio for people between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine is practically normal: about 103 men for 100 women. In rural areas, however, it’s as high as 119 men per 100 women of the same age. This is because like their fellow Chinese bare branches, firstborn Korean sons were expected to stay behind and care for their family farms and aging parents, while everyone else who could—young women included—moved to cities to take advantage of Korea’s industrialization-fueled boom. The imbalance has created a market for foreign brides, the majority of whom are from rural Vietnam, and for whom Chinese and Korean leftover men now must compete.
Korea’s “leftover women,” or “Gold Misses,” have very different lives. They are concentrated in urban areas and like their Chinese equivalents, they enjoy a good, if not enviable, standard of living. Their “gold” status is less directly correlated with the advantages of being an only daughter, because even in the peak years of family planning efforts, most households still had two kids. However, after centuries of preferring boys, Korean households have started to favor girls.
A component of this counter-trend is certainly economic. Korean men are expected to provide a marital home—a requirement that has become prohibitively expensive in big cities like Seoul and Busan. As in Japan, the country’s economic slowdown has atrophied the security and salaries once provided by big corporate jobs, which also require grueling hours and fierce loyalty. Kwarosa in Korean and karōshi in Japanese both mean “death by overwork” and are still serious issues in both countries.
In addition to the effects of an economic slowdown, Korean men have to contend with two years of mandatory military service, which some have complained gives women an unfair advantage in the workforce. This may be true: Korean women are employed at higher rates than Korean men between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine—albeit at 52 percent of their pay—but after that, the tables turn.
As is expected of Korean wives, many women leave the workforce in their thirties, spend a decade or so as homemakers and return to the workforce in their forties, often to lower-paying jobs than they had before. They don’t face the same work track discriminations as Japanese women, but they are expected to shoulder the majority of the housework, as their husbands—whose long hours and late nights of post-work socializing rival those of Japanese men—do not contribute their fair share of domestic duties. Korea’s feverish approach to education adds another element to the responsibilities of raising a child. Because the peninsula has limited land and not many natural resources, there is an extreme emphasis put on human talent in an already fierce job market. To remain competitive, most children are required to attend hagwon, or after-school academies, where they study subjects like math, English, science, and history. In PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test score results, they are consistently ranked among the top-performing students in the world, thanks largely to the extra training, but also the heavy parental supervision they receive.
Given the demands of being a wife and mother in Korea, it’s easy to understand how Korea’s numbers of Gold Misses have climbed steadily since the ’80s, when 15 percent of its women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine were single. Today, 70 percent of women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine are unmarried, and by the time South Korean women hit age thirty-nine, nearly 15 percent remain so. In a country where less than 1 percent of the overall population is unmarried, these numbers represent a significant shift away from coupled life.
“When women’s wages rise, more women can choose to stay single than marry traditional husbands,” explains economist Jisoo Hwang. Now an assistant professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, as part of her PhD research at Harvard, she studied patterns in advanced female education and marriage in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and the United States. She found that in East Asian “tiger economies,” where a burst of rapid economic growth—as seen in Japan in the 1960s–’80s, South Korea in the 1970s–’90s, and Singapore in the 1960s–’90s—led to greater female workforce participation and to an increase in the female-to-male median earnings of full-time employees, the marriage probability for college graduate women sharply decreased.
When considering this information, it’s important to note that although women’s salaries, relative to those of men, did increase in both South Korea and Japan during the respective boom years of each country, they
are still dismal. Japan and Korea rank 111th and 116th, respectively, out of 144 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report. Singapore, by comparison, ranks 55th, and China 99th. Nonetheless, writes Hwang, “labor force participation rates of women in the age group 25–34 in Japan, Korea, and Singapore increased by more than 17 percentage points from 1985 to 2006.” She notes that in the United States during this same period of time, female workforce participation rates only increased by 5 percentage points, representing a much more gradual increase over the years.
“My generation of women doesn’t relate as much with our mothers as previous generations did,” says Hwang, who was born in Korea in the mid-’80s. “We can get advanced degrees, pursue professional careers—this is all very different from the options most of our mothers had.” She adds that although many women in Korea are at some point forced to choose between focusing on a career or raising a family—because doing both is still very hard to do—there are at least successful Korean female role models who have proven that the professional route is possible.
As far as marriage goes, Hwang believes that because “gender norms don’t change as quickly as the markets,” Korean and Japanese men are still struggling to process the more modern roles that women have taken up outside of the home, mainly because they conflict drastically with the models that the men were exposed to as children.