Better in their words…

My wife suggested the following book as another good resource.

Half the sky : turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide / Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn Kristof, Nicholas D., 1959- New York : Alfred A. Knopf, c2009. 362.8309 Kri

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WSJ 11/28/2015

By Geeta Anand And Jaeyeon Woo

For many decades, South Korea’s demographic trajectory was similarly grim. A military dictatorship that ruled from 1961 to 1987 preaching economic development helped transform the nation from mostly rural and agrarian to mostly urban and industrial. Fertility levels plunged and education levels soared.

Even so, Confucian cultural practices, codified into law, dictated that the eldest son inherited most of the family property, worshiped ancestors and continued the family lineage. This meant that even the newly educated, smaller urban families still felt the need to have a son.

So they rapidly adopted ultrasound imaging when it became widely available here in the 1980s, to detect the sex of the fetus—and aborted females.

“When a patient knew she was going to have a second girl, she cried,” says Dr. Kim Ahm, a 60-year-old gynecologist at Asan Medical Center. “When you told her she was having a third daughter, the patient really panicked.”

These women went on to abort the fetuses, hoping for a son instead, Dr. Kim said.

Abortions of female fetuses became particularly commonplace if families already had one or two daughters. By 1990, the sex ratio for a third child had risen to 193 boys for each 100 girls.

By then, Korea had held its first democratic elections. Free from military dictatorship, the feminist rebellion, already brewing, was unleashed.

The government strengthened a medical law banning the sex detection of a fetus by yanking the medical license of offending doctors. In the early 1990s, the government added a jail sentence for errant doctors.

After reaching a high of 116.5 males born for every 100 females in 1990, the sex ratios began declining, although they were still well above normal.

Feminist groups worked the media, the legislature and the courts, demanding gender equality.

KoEun Kwang-soon, a Korean traditional-medicine doctor, says she was radicalized seeing the roots of the sex ratio-problem in her practice, where she was asked “too many times to make medicines that help a patient conceive a boy.”

In 1997, Ms. KoEun helped launch a campaign for allowing families to use either the mother’s or the father’s family name, instead of always the father’s. The campaign had more symbolic than practical impact, driving home the idea that girls were important too.

“People thought we were a bunch of crazy women,” she says.

The next year, she helped found the Citizens Association Working to Abolish Hojuje, the practice of fathers being considered the legal head of the family.

Legislators seemed supportive of abolishing the practice in private, but backed off from moving publicly because of “opposition in their constituencies,” says Kwak Bae-hee, president of the Korea Legal Aid Center for Family Relations.

Her group turned to the courts. In 2005, Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled Hojuje violated the constitution granting all citizens dignity and equality. Soon after, the court ruled that families didn’t have to take the father’s name.

With the end of Hojuje, “sons were no longer key to the family lineage continuing,” says Lee Ki-soon, the director general at the women’s policy bureau of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.

In South Korea, the sex ratio had fallen to 110 males for every 100 female babies by 2005. Five years later, it dipped to 107, and last year, for the first time in recent history, it reached the natural level of 105. That is on par with the ratio in the U.S. and Europe, where the slight excess of boys is believed to be nature’s way of accommodating their higher fragility.

It isn’t that the sexes are economically equal. Even though Koreans elected their first woman president, corporate and political leadership is still predominantly male. South Korea ranked 125th out of 142 countries for income equality between men and women, according to the Gender Gap Index 2014 published by the World Economic Forum.

But for women and men starting families, the idea that it is an imperative to have a son has changed.

“I see no one crying these days about the baby being a girl,” says Dr. Kim, the gynecologist.

Where more than 40% of mothers said in a government survey in 1991 that they should bear a son, only about 8% did so in a 2012 questionnaire.

That change is reflected in the experiences of 64-year-old Lim Ki-ouk and her daughter, both the eldest children in their families, both university lecturers and both mothers who gave birth only to daughters.

Ms. Lim, top right, with her daughters and granddaughters in Seoul Forest, says she once saw herself as a failure for only having daughters, but now she is envied.
Photo: TRUTH LEEM FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

With each of her four daughters, the mother says, she felt she had again “failed to continue the family line.” By contrast, when her daughter gave birth to three girls, a cranky uncle-in-law who dared suggest she keep trying for a son was scolded into apologizing.

“That’s how much South Korea has changed,” the daughter, Ko Bo-min, 38, said in a recent interview, squeezing the hand of her mother, seated across the table at a trendy cafe in Seoul.

Ms. Ko works as a college lecturer and researcher. Her husband doesn’t expect her to carry the double load of child-raising and work—he agreed they should pay for a baby-sitter who also helps with housekeeping.

Her mother interrupts. There was no such husband support when she worked as a university lecturer while raising her four daughters. Life was difficult, she says, because child care and housework also fell to her.

The Korean government has played a role in this transformation. It subsidizes the cost of child care at home, paying up to $177 a month for the first five years of a child’s life.

The government also offers incentives to companies for having paternity-leave policies that are more generous than maternity benefits. Local governments are organizing cooking classes and housekeeping courses for dads.

In this new era, Mrs. Lim, who once saw herself as a failure, now is envied. Quoting a new Korean saying that having two daughters gets you a gold medal, she gestures toward her orange-beaded neckline, smiles and says: “Now my friends say: ‘You get the diamond medal.’”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/asia-struggles-for-a-solution-to-its-missing-women-problem-1448545813