A leading Italian newspaper has identified conflict between men and women as the root cause of South Korea's deepening decline in births, drawing on the popularity of the novel "Kim Ji-young, Born 1982," the sight of women wearing hair rollers with business attire, the social mood reflected in the television series "Extraordinary Attorney Woo" and the lyrics of Blackpink songs to analyze Korean society from multiple angles.
The Italian daily Corriere della Sera examined the phenomenon and its causes on the 2nd in an international section article headlined "Korean mothers go on strike: the East Asian tiger faces extinction."
Reporter Michela Mantovan wrote that Korea's total fertility rate — the number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime — stood at 0.81 in 2021, among the lowest in the world. Babies are not being born in Korea, she wrote, and the small but powerful Asian tiger sits at the center of a demographic apocalypse. She pointed to inequality between men and women in Korean society and to discrimination in the workplace as the fundamental reasons the country has sunk into low birth rates. Women who have experienced these contradictions most acutely are deliberately avoiding childbirth, she wrote, describing the trend as a "birth strike."
In the capital, Seoul, she wrote, it is easy to spot well-dressed, carefully made-up women with hair rollers in their hair. She offered the unusual reading that the rollers, worn apparently without regard for the stares of passers-by, are a symbol of defiance against a world built by men. The article also carried a photograph of Lee Jung-mi, then acting chief justice of the Constitutional Court, arriving at work with hair rollers in her hair on March 10, 2017, the day the court ruled on the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye. Korean media at the time read Lee's hair rollers as a snapshot of a working mother.
The article also noted that "Kim Ji-young, Born 1982," a novel about a woman growing up amid gender discrimination, has sold more than 1 million copies in Korea. The reporter explained that Korean women, long suppressed by a Confucian culture defined by patriarchy, have become more conscious of discrimination between men and women through democratization and the influx of Western culture. Changes in social gender roles have lagged behind, she added, producing social conflict between men and women, between women and patriarchal culture, and between young men and committed feminists.
That social mood can be detected in the Netflix series "Extraordinary Attorney Woo," which drew global attention last year, the article said.
Episode 12 of the series, it said, realistically depicted how companies pressure women into submitting resignation letters when mergers or workforce reductions are planned.
The article also cited lyrics from Blackpink, one of the best-known groups in K-pop: "I don't want to be a princess. You can't put a price on my worth. There is no prince on my list of things I want. Love is a drug I've quit."
As conflict between men and women has intensified, many women are striking in the form of avoiding childbirth to escape being treated as "baby-making machines," the article said, while some are actively choosing single life under what is known as "4B" — refusing dating, sex, marriage and childbirth.
The reporter concluded that gender equality is ultimately the solution capable of overcoming a low birth rate, stressing that only guaranteeing women a more just and safer life can miraculously turn back the threat of extinction facing the Korean people.