Fertility Rate and Gender-Role Attitudes: A Unique Story of South Korea In Comparison to Japan, Sweden and the United States

Background and Purpose:
Low fertility rates have been a social policy concern in many developed countries for decades. A puzzling question is how changes in gender attitudes relate to the development of family policies and fertility trends. Given its ultra-low fertility rate (.75 in 2024), South Korea presents a valuable case to examine in terms of gender attitudes related to fertility trends and family policies in crossnational comparative studies.

In this study, we compare South Korea with three different types of welfare states —Sweden (a Nordic welfare state), the U.S. (a liberal regime), and Japan (a non-Western nation), and aim to answer two questions: 1. What are characteristics of fertility rates, family policies , gender gap in labor force participation, and gender-role attitudes in these four welfare states? 2. How do multidimensional gender-role attitudes in South Korea differ from the other three countries?

Methods:
We draw data from OECD family dataset and World Values Survey, and conducted descriptive statistical analysis of country-level data on fertility rates, families policies, and gender attitudes during the past four decades. Drawing on the concept of multidimensional gender-role attitudes, we selected survey questions on egalitarianism in laborforce (i.e. the primacy of a man’s job), gender essentialism (i.e. the necessity of children for women’s fulfillment), and the notion of individual choice/normative values (i.e. whether both husband and wife should contribute to income, being a housewife is just as fulfilling as working for pay; pre-school child suffers with working mother).

Results:

South Korea appears to have multiple characteristics in its public policy and gender attitude data that make it unique. Gender essentialist traits were salient in the data; an overwhelming 92% of participants in Korea responded that “a woman has to have children to be fulfilled,” compared to 66% in Japan, 25% in Sweden, and 15% in the US. However, a more nuanced picture emerges when examining other data. Regarding the belief that both spouses should contribute to the household income, South Korea shows a relatively high level of support (74% total agreement), which is significantly higher than Japan’s 56%. The fact that South Koreans largely agree that both men and women should contribute to the economy is in conflict with the gender essentialist views found in other survey items.

Conclusions and Implications:

To sum up, many South Koreans believe that women should have children to be fulfilled (92%) and that both husband and wife should work for pay (74%). The extremely low fertility rate of South Korea may be because when Koreans feel that they cannot be ‘good-enough’ parents who are financially secure and physically present for their children, their choice is to relinquish parenthood (or women’s fulfillment as mothers). It may be an impossible dilemma in which both parents must work to be financially secure, but that financial security comes at the expense of what feels like an abandonment of maternal responsibilities. This incompatibility of parenthood and economic security may be relevant in other developed countries as well.