by Hanna Rosin
I chose South Korea to visit because it’s so blatantly on this collision course, but I could have chosen any number of countries in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and probably, in a generation or so, Africa. Women worldwide are educating themselves and accumulating credentials. Economies everywhere are becoming dependent on the women’s success, even their unfettered ambition despite resistance from local versions of macho culture.
In Latin American countries, women’s rapid entry into the educated workforce over the last twenty years is credited with lifting several countries out of poverty, according to a recent United Nations report. But Latin machismo has kept them out of top spots—for now. A recent report found that Latin American companies had fewer women in senior positions than companies in almost any other region. In Mexico, two legislators recently tried to introduce a law requiring women with children to stay home a certain number of hours a week, but that seemed a shade too desperate; a women’s executive group squashed it.
In fact, a country’s comfort level with the rise of women is becoming a marker of global success. In 2006, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development devised the Gender, Institutions and Development Database, which measures the economic and political power of women in 160 countries. With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success. Aid agencies have started to recognize this relationship and have pushed to either funnel aid through women or institute political quotas in about a hundred countries, essentially forcing women into power in an effort to improve those countries’ fortunes. In many countries, advancing women requires delicately tiptoeing around local customs that put men in charge of money or trust only men to be leaders.
But women are in fact advancing, and their success is causing cultural upheaval all over the world. Spanish demographer Albert Esteve has been tracking the global rise of women and its effects on marriage patterns. Historically, women have tended to marry men with more education or status than they have. But as women get more credentialed, that trend is halting virtually all over the world, and in some countries has even started to reverse itself. In France, Hungary, Israel, Portugal, Brazil, Belarus, Mongolia, Colombia, among a handful of others, the majority of women now marry down, meaning marry men with less education than they have.
In Spain, some men have found a way to end-run this unsettling new phenomenon for the moment. Instead of marrying a successful Spanish woman, they find a wife among the new wave of Latin American or Eastern European immigrants. “When a man here marries a woman from Colombia he is marrying the kind of woman he would have married fifty years ago in Spain,” says Esteve. The ambitious Spanish women, meanwhile, find a husband among the German or Swedish men coming to Spain. “I suppose the women are marrying the kind of man they will find fifty years from now in Spain. The Spanish men,” he adds, “are looking for a woman from the past, while the women are looking for men in the future.”
The problem with this strategy is that the Colombian women don’t stand still, either. Latin America is delayed in this trend because there is less economic opportunity and urban rents are high, but women there are also going to university more and starting to delay marriage. “In so many of these countries men don’t realize that women’s expectations have changed,” says Esteve. “Women are working and having education and economic independence and they are not willing to settle for the old kinds of marriages where they are expected to take care of everything, and this is creating a mismatch in the marriage market.”
In Asia that mismatch is extreme. Like most Asian countries, Korea has a fast-aging workforce with a very low birthrate. The country has infinite potential to grow its economy, but it can’t do that without future workers. And at the moment, Korean women, newly liberated to work and spend and live as they please, have no incentive to produce those future workers. For three years running, South Korea has had the world’s lowest birthrate, according to the World Health Organization. Among the ten countries with the lowest birthrates, half are in Asia.
Korean women have started to avoid marriage in droves, another remarkable shift in a country that has clung to the Princess Bride fantasy longer than most. In 2010, the average age for first marriage for Korean women was thirty-two, six years higher than in the United States. Divorce, still taboo in Asian society, has tripled in Korea since the 1990s. One in five Korean and Taiwanese women in their thirties is single. In Japan, it’s one in three, and demographers guess that half of those will remain unmarried.
The Asian media is filled with faintly condescending and sometimes hostile articles about the new breed of Asian power woman. In Korea she is known as the alpha girl, the King Kong girl (a term invented by French feminist Virginie Despentes), or the “dried fish” woman, dessicated and lonely. The most common term is the semiofficial “Gold Miss,” defined by Korean government agencies as a professional, single woman over thirty who makes the equivalent of about $40,000 or more. “All that glitters is not gold,” one article that originally ran in The China Post explains about the Gold Misses. They “typically spend their money on fashion, cosmetics, plastic surgery, travel or marriage agencies,” the article goes on to explain, and then ends with a warning from a life planner: “Housewives will be with children and husband even if she lacks money. Gold Miss will find her life empty if she has no money.”
Since Yeeun Kim broke up with her boyfriend and started debating, she has tried to date other men. But the same dynamic always unfolds. At first, when she’s attracted to someone, she tries to impress him. “I behave to his expectations,” she says. “I am very quiet and when I do speak, I lower my voice. If we go out to dinner I let him choose the dishes and I eat small amounts. I pretend, ‘Oh, this is what I really want.’” But she can’t keep it up. Eventually, she tries to persuade him to change his expectations, “but it’s almost impossible. And then I start to lose interest.” Once I asked Yeeun to show me how she does it, how exactly she lives up to a potential boyfriend’s expectations across the table at dinner. She put the back of her hand to her mouth and giggled softly, but then quickly put her hand down in disgust. “I can’t do it anymore.” She’s clear in her mind that she wants a child, but marriage? “I’m afraid of it.” Her mother, Yeeun guesses, was unhappy with her father because she was ignored. “He prioritized his ideas over hers, and she couldn’t accomplish her dreams.”
Yeeun is not one of the spoiled, entitled women of Ewha university. The daughter of an army chaplain who has known hard times, she has “always felt a certain desperation to boost myself up.” When she was a little girl, her mother told her she should grow up to be an “international leader” or a “female CEO,” without really knowing what that meant. Her parents did not speak English and never traveled out of the country. She improved her English largely by watching Disney videotapes. Yeeun claims that she was at the bottom of her class in high school, and it was only after she started debating that “I changed my dream,” she says. “I started to recognize myself as someone who can win over many great, intelligent people in debating. So, I told my father that I wanted to be a more successful woman.”
How would a husband fit into her new dream? “I’m afraid he might restrict my lifestyle and the goals I want to pursue,” she says. “If I get married and live a very unhappy life, what is the point?”
I AM A BAD WOMAN
The headline appeared across a full-page ad in several Korean newspapers in 2009. The text of the ad read like a private diary, or some kind of written confession or cry for help. The plea was unsigned, and many people who read it assumed that it was a clever campaign for some new deodorant or makeup or one of the daytime soap operas that run on Korean television. But there was a little too much realism in the ad, and not all that much romance.
I may be a good employee, but to my family, I am a failure. In their eyes, I am a bad daughter-in-law, a bad parent, a bad wife and a bad mother. Do the benefits of working rationalize carrying all these labels? .
. .
I want to share my burden with others. I am desperate to hear words of support—that I am on my way to achieving greater things, that I shouldn’t give up now. I need a family who can lead me through difficulties. I need a family who can be there for me always.
Eventually the Korean media made their way to the author, thirty-six-year-old Hwang Myeong-eun, who took out the ad with her own money for exactly the reasons she wrote: She was “desperate,” she told me when we met in her office in the winter. At the time, Hwang’s son was four, and she was the chief financial officer at a major advertising firm in Korea. She was working sixteen-hour days, leaving before her son woke up and coming home after he was in bed every day. She was making more money than her husband, but this fact went unacknowledged between them, and did not change the usual household dynamics. He never helped out at home, and she was still the one who got the scolding calls from the mother-in law: “Have you forgotten today is the day of your father-in-law’s memorial service? Your other family members are already here. I understand you are talented and all, but do you ever fulfill your family obligations?” What eventually broke her, Hwang told me, was the morning her son woke up before she left for work and caught her as she was walking out the door. He wanted to sing her his favorite song before she left, “and I had to cut him off in the middle. I had to leave.”
Working mothers the world over may complain, but in Korea the pressures on them are unimaginable. Work hours in Korea are the second longest of any advanced nation, after Japan. Office workers typically stay until eight or nine at night, and then are usually expected to go out drinking with their colleagues or clients—the Korean extreme-sport version of bonding and networking. As women have begun flooding the workforce, they have disrupted these elaborate post-work rituals, but they haven’t fundamentally transformed them. The drinking sessions still involve several rounds of high-proof soju, a sweet, vodka-like drink. Employees are asked on applications how many bottles of soju they can down in a session, and the newly ambitious working women feel pressure to keep up with the boys. Sometimes the colleagues will decamp to a “salon,” a Hooters-like club where sexy waitresses serve the drinks. Most of the working women peel off at this point, but a few sigh and follow along, then spend the night sitting awkwardly with the group or trying to make conversation with the waitresses.
Asian society is stereotyped as family centered, but the stereotype only applies in an era where women stayed home full-time. Workplaces in much of Asia are distinctly incompatible with any kind of home life. Flextime or part-time arrangements are unheard of, and women are usually reluctant to take advantage of maternity leave for more than a month or two. At the same time, the domestic burdens on a Korean wife haven’t changed much since the turn of the century: She is expected to cook, clean the house herself, and take care of both sets of in-laws. And in the modern era of ultra-competitive schooling, she also has to manage her children’s unbelievably complicated roster of extracurricular activities. And have I mentioned that nannies are frowned upon? Mothers use them, but always with apologies, and often they end up cobbling together child care using the more acceptable combination of relatives and trusted neighbors.
Hwang is an unlikely person to have become a poster girl for the impossible situation of the modern Korean woman. She is pretty in an old-fashioned, feminine way, with a perfect bob framing her delicate face, and the day I met her she had light blue nails that perfectly matched her cashmere sweater. She seems reserved and cautious and not at all the type to opt for a public confession. But somebody had to do it. Korea does not have a tell-all kind of culture. There is no equivalent of Oprah or The View, no public space for girlfriends to keep it real. Magazines are not full of wrenching essays by young women frustrated by the dating scene or working mothers agonized by the time squeeze. Self-help and chick-lit have only penetrated the publishing market in the last couple of years. When newspapers mention the dilemmas of the new alpha girls, they generally enlist experts to supply withering diagnoses of their psychological weaknesses: “obsessed with having to excel in everything and more likely to form unsuitable relationships,” or “unconsciously dislike men they have to compete with, so they gravitate toward men with lowlier jobs than theirs or even no job at all.”
Two thousand nine should have been a tremendous year for Hwang. She was thriving in her job, making more money than ever, and she had a beautiful son. But instead, she found herself full of intense, conflicting emotions with nowhere to put them. What made it worse was she had no role models to follow. A generation earlier, Korean women barely worked, so mothers had only vague advice to offer, and probably a dose of disapproval. And in this culture, shrinks are unheard of. So Hwang fell apart. “I was making excuses at home and excuses at work and I was so stressed out,” she says. “The guilty feeling that I couldn’t be with my kid was the worst thing I’d ever experienced. I wanted to be with him, to take care of him the right way, and I couldn’t.”
Why didn’t she quit her job? “Because I had to make money. Nowadays if you don’t have a double income you can’t properly educate your child and send him to the right schools.” She was a bad mother if she failed to stay home and take care of her child, and a bad mother if she failed to work and help pay for her child’s schooling. How could a woman win? Her dilemma would have been a familiar one to Americans, but in Korea it was a novelty to have someone say it aloud.
When I caught up with Hwang a year and a half after she ran the ads, she had finally quit her job and started her own company. Now she is head of a small boutique advertising firm, Ark & Pancom. She is a rare female CEO in the industry, but she is not intimidated by the competition. Advertising, she figured, values creativity and attention to detail, qualities she believes women have in abundance. Since she made her confession, her husband started helping around the house more. On weekends if she is tired, he will sometimes watch their son by himself. But she still has to tiptoe around him. “I have to be cautious, to make sure he does not feel inferior to me.” She makes a point of asking his advice about small domestic decisions, new clothes for herself or a fish for their son’s aquarium. If he wants to have sex she complies, no matter how tired she is, because “I don’t want to wound his pride,” she says.
Hwang received hundreds of letters after her ads ran and was invited to speak at many public forums. She gives herself some credit for helping to change the climate for working women. After the ads ran, the government expanded child-care options for lower-income women, and more actively encouraged companies to offer flexible work schedules. And she is hopeful that younger men will change their ideas about working women and help out more around the house. But what about her life? Had it changed all that much?
Not really. In fact, Hwang’s family schedule would probably strike even hardworking Americans as alarming. She leaves the house at seven A.M. and returns home sometime between eleven P.M. and one A.M. “Most Korean companies expect us to work very late,” she says. “I’m the boss now, so I have to take care of everything.” I asked about her son’s schedule, and this was the only time I saw the flash of sadness that could have prompted her dramatic public confession. He comes back from kindergarten at three thirty each day and then goes straight to two cram schools, where he studies some combination of art, painting, music, tae kwan do, English, Korean, Chinese, and mathematics. “I manage the cram schools through the nannies,” she says. She still doesn’t see him during the week, but she tries to spend most of her time on the weekends with him if she’s not too tired.
“I hope my son sees me as a good mother when he grows up,” she says. “I hope he sees me as someone who accomplished important things for his future.”
WHAT’S THE ANSWER? How does a new generation of Korean women fulfill their ambitions without destroying their souls? One solution bubbling up is something Korean authorities don’t want to discuss, something that wounds their deep sense of national pride and makes them panic about their future. Elite Koreans th
ese days almost always spend some time abroad to improve their English, either in high school, college, or graduate school. Per capita, Korea exports a larger percentage of students than almost any other nation. Families who can afford it move to the United States or Australia for a few years, and those that can’t, send children to live with relatives.
The idea is that the students will come back and enrich the national economy. They will help the Korean conglomerates grow and better export their products. They will help exalt their country’s place in the global culture. They will transform the average Korean’s identity from one of provincial pride to that of sophisticated citizen of the world. But for the women especially, this is not always how it happens. When they travel abroad they realize that women in other countries live differently, that women in other countries do not pay such a high price for their ambitions. There is a reason that the top ambition for young Korean women these days is “foreign diplomat” or “global leader.” Even as early as high school, they must sense that they will need an escape.
Yongah Kim went to college at one of Seoul’s most prestigious universities, and then got her MBA at Harvard Business School. When she graduated in 2001 she interviewed with a large Korean conglomerate, a Korean bank, and several foreign firms, including a few investment banks and consulting firms that had expanded their business in the country after the economic crisis of the 1990s. At the foreign consulting firms she was asked very specific, logic-driven questions: How would you solve the traffic problem in Seoul, for example. At the Korean firms the questions were more generic, and also intrusive: What are your strengths? Do you have a boyfriend? If you get married, would you continue to work? One interviewer said, “Let’s assume your boss asked you to fetch coffee. Would you do it?” Yongah answered: “Only if he would fetch coffee for me.”
