In what's being dubbed a "birth strike", South Korean women are having fewer children, with the country recording the lowest fertility rate in the world.
In an attempt to reverse the trend, the South Korean government is offering increased financial incentives for parents of infants and toddlers, as well as benefits for medical costs associated with pregnancy, infertility treatment and even dating.
But journalist and author Hawon Jung says these measures fail to recognise a broader issue.
"I think money is really only a fraction of the problem," she tells ABC RN's Sunday Extra.
She says serious social conditions impacting women are playing a role in women's decision to not have children. These include their vulnerability to violent crime and digital exploitation, a growing public presence of misogyny, and contending with one of the worst gender pay gaps in the world.
Not all women are choosing to be childless as a political statement, Jung says; but there are plenty who are.
Women's anger and frustration
Internationally, South Korea is known as an economically, culturally and technologically advanced country, says Jung, whose latest book is Flowers of Fire: the Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What it Means for Women's Rights Worldwide.
One of its lesser known sides, however, is that it "remains a fairly conservative country in terms of gender norms", she says.
Aside from its gender pay gap, which has rated lowest among OECD nations for nearly three decades, the country has also ranked as the worst place to be a working woman in the industrialised world.
"South Korea is also known as one of the safest places in the world that is relatively free from guns and drugs. But when a violent crime does occur, nearly 90 per cent of victims are women," Jung says.
And South Korea's technological innovations — the country is home to Samsung, for example — have given rise to what Jung calls an "epidemic" of spy-cam crimes.
She says these crimes involve perpetrators — "especially young men" — using smartphones or mini cameras mounted in items like eyeglasses or takeaway cups "to secretly take sexually compromising images of women in public spaces, most notably women's public toilets." These are then often shared on the internet "for entertainment or for profit".
"There has been a lot of anger or frustration among a lot of women about this reality," Jung says.
And she argues that trying to boost birth rates using cash incentives ignores social factors such as these.
A 'new language' to define injustices
In recent years South Korea has experienced a "powerful wave of feminist movement", Jung says.
In part, it has been fuelled by the global #MeToo movement, but also by incidents like the brutal 2016 murder of a 22-year-old woman by a male perpetrator, who reportedly felt "ignored" by women.
This feminist uprising has given women a "new language to define these everyday injustices they felt but they didn't [or] couldn't articulate before", Jung says.
However, she says it's prompted a backlash. There has been pushback from those who consider that women have gone "too far" and that "now men are the victims of 'reverse discrimination'".
There's a "palpable" resentment towards feminism among young men in their 20s or 30s, Jung says.
That's a sentiment some politicians are attempting to court, says Kyungja Jung, associate professor of social and political sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, and an expert in women's activism in Korea.
"Politicians [in the] last [South Korean] presidential election capitalised on these gender war discourses, and there was a real gender divide between male[s] in their 20s and they supported the conservative party, and the young females in their 20s supported the progressive party," Dr Jung says.
President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was elected last year, has said that South Korea has "no structural gender discrimination".
But there have been concerning moves since his election.
"Policies that previously championed [gender equality] or aimed at tackling sexism in society … took a very significant U-turn to emphasise instead women's traditional role as mothers or caregivers for the family," Hawon Jung says.
"For instance, Yoon's right-wing government, the People Power Party, is seeking to dismantle the gender equality ministry, and is trying to replace it with a smaller office responsible for, among other things, family or population.
"And also the government recently decided to remove the term 'gender equality' from the school textbooks."
Unhelpful 'blanket assumptions'
Despite the backlash, Dr Jung says that feminism in South Korea "is still strong … even compared to Australia".
And she cautions against conflating a strong feminist movement with a low fertility rate.
To understand the low rate, it's important to look more broadly to issues that impact women and men, Dr Jung says.
"Women can be the blame of all the issues [but] actually the issues are more structural inequality."
She offers the example of the Sampo generation, a term used to refer to a young generation of Koreans who have given up on dating, marriage and having children.
Their reasons for doing so is often about the structural issues that make their lives difficult, Dr Jung says.
These include the high cost of living expenses, very expensive housing, high youth unemployment, precarious housing and competitive education.
It's a difficult context for raising children, and it's not unique to South Korea. For example, China and Singapore's fertility rates also rate low.
And while Dr Jung says there is definitely an increase in digital crimes in South Korea, in other countries crimes like revenge porn have also increased.
Similarly, she doesn't single out South Korea for violence against women, pointing to the horrific figures in Australia. On average, one woman a week in Australia is murdered by her current or former partner.
"I really want to look at [the situation in South Korea] in a very objective way," she says.
"I think we need to have a balanced approach [and to avoid making] blanket assumption[s]," she says.
"There are many issues."
Hawon Jung agrees that there's a complex mix of factors contributing to South Korea's low fertility rate.
However, she says highlighting the choices women are making means highlighting the difficult social context many are living in.
"For a lot of women, the decision to stay childless and not get married is not necessarily political," she says.
"[It is] just a very natural result of growing up watching their mothers taking [a] disproportionate burden of domestic responsibility and childcare and thinking, 'I don't want to live like that', or watching their married colleagues being pushed out of their jobs and thinking, 'I really don't want something like that to happen to me'."
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