Why South Korean women aren't having babies
On a rainy Tuesday afternoon, Yejin is cooking lunch for her friends at her apartment, where she lives alone on the outskirts of Seoul, happily single. While they eat, one of them pulls up a wellworn meme of a cartoon dinosaur on her phone. "Be careful," the dinosaur says. "Don't let yourself become extinct like us."
The women all laugh. "It's funny, but it's dark, because we know we could be causing our own extinction," says Yejin, a 30-year-old television producer.
Neither she, nor any of her friends, are planning on having children. They are part of a growing community of women choosing the child-free life.
South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, beating its own staggeringly low record year after year. Figures released on Wednesday show it fell by another 8% in 2023 to 0.72.
This refers to the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. For a population to hold steady, that number should be 2.1. If this trend continues, Korea's population is estimated to halve by the year 2100.
Globally, developed countries are seeing birth rates fall, but none in such an extreme way as South Korea. Its projections are grim. In 50 years time, the number of working age people will have halved, the pool eligible to take part in the country's mandatory military service will have shrunk by 58%, and nearly half the population will be older than 65.
This bodes so badly for the country's economy and security that politicians have declared it "a national emergency".
For nearly 20 years, successive governments have thrown money at the problem - 379.8 trillion KRW ($286bn) to be exact.
Couples who have children are showered with cash, from monthly handouts to subsidised housing and free taxis. Hospital bills and even IVF treatments are covered, though only for those who are married.
Such financial incentives have not worked, leading politicians to brainstorm more "creative" solutions, like hiring nannies from South East Asia and paying them below minimum wage, and exempting men from serving in the military if they have three children before turning 30.
Policymakers have been accused of not listening to young people - especially women - about their needs.
When Yejin decided to live alone in her mid-20s, she defied social norms - in Korea, single living is considered a temporary phase in one's life. But five years ago, she decided not to get married, and not to have children. "It's hard to find a dateable man in Korea - one who will share the chores and the childcare equally," she tells me, "And women who have babies alone are not judged kindly."
Yejin has chosen to focus on her career in television, which, she argues, doesn't allow her enough time to raise a child. Korean work hours are notoriously long.
Yejin works a traditional 9-6 job but says she usually doesn't leave the office until 8pm and there is overtime on top of that. Once she gets home, she only has time to clean the house or exercise before bed. "I love my job, it brings me so much fulfilment," she says. "But working in Korea is hard, you're stuck in a perpetual cycle of work."
Yejin says there is also pressure to study in her spare time, to get better at her job: "Koreans have this mindset that if you don't continuously work on self-improvement, you're going to get left behind, and become a failure. This fear makes us work twice as hard."
"Sometimes at the weekends I go and get an IV drip, just to get enough energy to go back to work on Monday," she adds casually, as if this were a fairly normal weekend activity.
She also shares the same fear of every woman I spoke to - that if she were to take time off to have a child, she might not be able to return to work. "There is an implicit pressure from companies that when we have children, we must leave our jobs," she says. She has watched it happen.
People were forced to leave their jobs or were passed over for promotions after taking maternity leave.
Korean women are the most highly educated of those in OECD countries, and yet the country has the worst gender pay gap and a higher-than-average proportion of women out of work compared to men. Researchers say this proves they are being presented with a trade-off - have a career or have a family. They are choosing career.
Stella Shin teaches five-yearolds English at an afterschool club. At 39, Stella does not have children of her own. She has been married for six years, and both she and her husband wanted a child but were so busy working and enjoying themselves that time slipped away.
"Mothers need to quit work to look after their child full time for the first two years, and this would make me very depressed," she said. "I love my career and taking care of myself." In her spare time Stella attends K-pop dance classes.
Even if she wanted to give up work, or juggle a family and a career, she said she could not afford to because the cost of housing is too high. More than half the population live in or around the capital Seoul, which is where the vast majority of opportunities are, creating huge pressure on apartments and resources. Stella and her husband have been pushed further and further away from the capital, into neighbouring provinces, and are still unable to buy their own place.
Then there is the cost of private education. From the age of four, children are sent to an array of expensive extra-curricular classes - from maths and English, to music and Taekwondo. The practice is so widespread that to opt out is seen as setting your child up to fail, an inconceivable notion in hypercompetitive Korea. This has made it the most expensive country in the world to raise a child.
As a teacher at one of these cram schools, Stella understands the burden all too well. She watches parents spend up to £700 ($890) per child a month, many of whom cannot afford it. "But without these classes, the children fall behind."
For some, this system of excessive private tuition cuts deeper than cost. "Minji" confided that her childhood and 20s had been unhappy. "I've spent my whole life studying," she said - first to get into a good university, then for her civil servant exams, and then to get her first job at 28. She remembers her childhood years spent in classrooms until late at night, cramming maths, which she loathed and was bad at, while she dreamed of being an artist.
"I've had to compete endlessly, not to achieve my dreams, but just to live a mediocre life," she said. "It's been so draining." Only now, aged 32, does Minji feel free, and able to enjoy herself. She loves to travel and is learning to dive.
But her biggest consideration is that she does not want to put a child through the same competitive misery she experienced.
"Korea is not a place where children can live happily," she concluded. Her husband would like a child, and they used to fight about it, but he has come to accept her wishes.
Over the past 50 years, Korea's economy has developed at breakneck speed, propelling women into higher education and the workforce, and expanding their ambitions, but the roles of wife and mother have not evolved at nearly the same pace.
Minji says she is grateful she has agency. "We are the first generation who get to choose. Before, we had to have children."
Back at Yejin's apartment, her friends are haggling over her belongings. Fatigued with life in Korea, Yejin has decided to leave for New Zealand. She woke up one morning with a realisation that noone was forcing her to live here. She researched which countries ranked highly on gender equality, and New Zealand emerged a winner. "It's a place where men and women are paid equally," she says, "So I'm off."
It appears politicians might slowly be accepting the depth and complexity of the crisis. This month, South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol acknowledged that the attempts to spend their way out of the problem "hadn't worked", and that South Korea was "excessively and unnecessarily competitive".
He said his government would now treat the low birth rate as a "structural problem".
I caught up with Yejin from New Zealand, where she had been living for three months. She was buzzing about her new life and friends, and her job working in the kitchen of a pub. "My work-life balance is so much better," she said. She can arrange to meet her friends during the week. "I feel so much more respected at work and people are less judgemental," she added. "It's making me not want to go home."