Why South Korean women aren't having babies

I assume that's not great, but it might be better than working the late shift at Taco Bell for the rest of someone's life.

I'm conflicted on this. On one hand, it could be a solution to low birth rates.

On the other hand, it toes a very fine line on sexism.

It's a pretty bad image for women that we're willing to pay them more to reproduce than most other things. A woman having a baby every 12 months makes 30% more than the median household income. There are economic justifications, but it's a bad look.

While it's nominally a voluntary process, it can be viewed through a lens where we as a society make being poor awful (or fail to make being poor bearable) and the only reliable escape we offer is reproducing, casting doubts on how voluntary participation really is. If a woman is going to get evicted and the only means she can find to get out of that is having a baby, is her participation really voluntary?

I also don't know whether we should financialize having children. That may lead to a very different and less optimal kind of parenting.

The last I've found is disparate impact on genders. I generally get that the benefits are for the child, but $100k is enough that I think it could create dramatically disparate outcomes. We'd practically be offering a down payment on a house, or a way to avoid bankruptcy, or seed funding for a startup, but only to women. Straight men would need to couple with a woman to qualify, gay men wouldn't be able to qualify at all.

That may not apply if this program applies to adoptions too, as it probably should.

>It's still women who still expect men to be high earners, now men have to do half of the housework on top of spending time with children in the evenings then get screamed at for having mediocre finances when their careers flatline.

It sounds like you had a bad experience and are now using that to generalize about a large population of people. Why is it only acceptable for men to seek independence and fulfillment from a career? No one is forcing men into a 12 hour a day job, either. It seems only reasonable that if both partners are working, that they split the household chores and child rearing.

Perhaps it’s the working hours, high cost of living, traditional expectations of women and ultra competitive culture that is collapsing society, and not the women wanting better for themselves. Unless your solution is to rollback the clock several decades or force women into motherhood and domestic labor, I’m not even really sure what your point is here.

The solution that many S. Korean women have found for themselves, in order to have a fulfilling career/not be dependent on a husband, is to remain single and/or childless. Clearly these women are fine living on a single income and cleaning up after themselves, so it’s pretty evident that many women aren’t just after high earnings or that they “still expect men to be high earners.” For women who want a career, they don’t also want to come home and be solely responsible for taking care of their husband and kids. If men want to be in a relationship with these career women, then they need to help out around the house. If they don’t want to do that, then it’s pretty clear that these S. Korean women are completely fine being on their own.

> They didn't interview men because the responses would not fit the narrative that the BBC seeks.

Yeah, it’s an article about South Korean women. Not about S. Korean men. Are you saying that the account of these S. Korean women should be totally discounted because they didn’t interview any men?