The End of Men and the Rise of Women (32 page)

Pretty soon, without anyone anticipating or planning for it, these changes started to erode the traditional patriarchal order. In 1991, the country’s laws were revised so that women could keep custody of their children after a divorce and inherit property. In 2005, the government abolished the law making men the automatic head of the family and allowed mothers to register children under their own family names. As recently as 1985, about half of all women in a national survey said they “must have a son.” That percentage fell slowly until 1991, and then plummeted to just over 15 percent by 2003. In the latest national study in 2010, about 40 percent of mothers and fathers said they would prefer a
daughter
, about 30 percent said a son, and the rest said they had no preference. Male preference in South Korea “is over,” says Monica Das Gupta, a demographer and Asia expert at the World Bank. “It happened so fast. It’s hard to believe it, but it is.”

Now South Korea is in economic and cultural crisis. The extremely modern, test-based meritocracy the government established was embedded in an old-fashioned patriarchy, and the two systems are at last at war. At the center of that war are Korea’s women, caught
between society’s mixed messages that they should study hard and work like killers but somehow still remain dainty women and old-fashioned wives.

I chose South Korea to visit because it’s so blatantly on this collision course, but I could have chosen any number of countries in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and probably, in a generation or so, Africa. Women worldwide are educating themselves and accumulating credentials. Economies everywhere are becoming dependent on the women’s success, even their unfettered ambition despite resistance from local versions of macho culture.

In Latin American countries, women’s rapid entry into the educated workforce over the last twenty years is credited with lifting several countries out of poverty, according to a recent United Nations report. But Latin machismo has kept them out of top spots—for now. A recent report found that Latin American companies had fewer women in senior positions than companies in almost any other region. In Mexico, two legislators recently tried to introduce a law
requiring
women with children to stay home a certain number of hours a week, but that seemed a shade too desperate; a women’s executive group squashed it.

In fact, a country’s comfort level with the rise of women is becoming a marker of global success. In 2006, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development devised the Gender, Institutions and Development Database, which measures the economic and political power of women in 160 countries. With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success. Aid agencies have started to recognize this relationship and have pushed to either funnel aid through women or institute political quotas in about a hundred countries, essentially forcing women
into power in an effort to improve those countries’ fortunes. In many countries, advancing women requires delicately tiptoeing around local customs that put men in charge of money or trust only men to be leaders.

But women are in fact advancing, and their success is causing cultural upheaval all over the world. Spanish demographer Albert Esteve has been tracking the global rise of women and its effects on marriage patterns. Historically, women have tended to marry men with more education or status than they have. But as women get more credentialed, that trend is halting virtually all over the world, and in some countries has even started to reverse itself. In France, Hungary, Israel, Portugal, Brazil, Belarus, Mongolia, Colombia, among a handful of others, the majority of women now marry down, meaning marry men with less education than they have.

In Spain, some men have found a way to end-run this unsettling new phenomenon for the moment. Instead of marrying a successful Spanish woman, they find a wife among the new wave of Latin American or Eastern European immigrants. “When a man here marries a woman from Colombia he is marrying the kind of woman he would have married fifty years ago in Spain,” says Esteve. The ambitious Spanish women, meanwhile, find a husband among the German or Swedish men coming to Spain. “I suppose the women are marrying the kind of man they will find fifty years from now in Spain. The Spanish men,” he adds, “are looking for a woman from the past, while the women are looking for men in the future.”

The problem with this strategy is that the Colombian women don’t stand still, either. Latin America is delayed in this trend because there is less economic opportunity and urban rents are high, but women there are also going to university more and starting to
delay marriage. “In so many of these countries men don’t realize that women’s expectations have changed,” says Esteve. “Women are working and having education and economic independence and they are not willing to settle for the old kinds of marriages where they are expected to take care of everything, and this is creating a mismatch in the marriage market.”

In Asia that mismatch is extreme. Like most Asian countries, Korea has a fast-aging workforce with a very low birthrate. The country has infinite potential to grow its economy, but it can’t do that without future workers. And at the moment, Korean women, newly liberated to work and spend and live as they please, have no incentive to produce those future workers. For three years running, South Korea has had the world’s lowest birthrate, according to the World Health Organization. Among the ten countries with the lowest birthrates, half are in Asia.

Korean women have started to avoid marriage in droves, another remarkable shift in a country that has clung to the Princess Bride fantasy longer than most. In 2010, the average age for first marriage for Korean women was thirty-two, six years higher than in the United States. Divorce, still taboo in Asian society, has tripled in Korea since the 1990s. One in five Korean and Taiwanese women in their thirties is single. In Japan, it’s one in three, and demographers guess that half of those will remain unmarried.

The Asian media is filled with faintly condescending and sometimes hostile articles about the new breed of Asian power woman. In Korea she is known as the alpha girl, the King Kong girl (a term invented by French feminist Virginie Despentes), or the “dried fish” woman, dessicated and lonely. The most common term is the semiofficial “Gold Miss,” defined by Korean government agencies as a professional, single woman over thirty who makes the equivalent of
about $40,000 or more. “All that glitters is not gold,” one article that originally ran in
The China Post
explains about the Gold Misses. They “typically spend their money on fashion, cosmetics, plastic surgery, travel or marriage agencies,” the article goes on to explain, and then ends with a warning from a life planner: “Housewives will be with children and husband even if she lacks money. Gold Miss will find her life empty if she has no money.”

Since Yeeun Kim broke up with her boyfriend and started debating, she has tried to date other men. But the same dynamic always unfolds. At first, when she’s attracted to someone, she tries to impress him. “I behave to his expectations,” she says. “I am very quiet and when I do speak, I lower my voice. If we go out to dinner I let him choose the dishes and I eat small amounts. I pretend, ‘Oh, this is what I really want.’” But she can’t keep it up. Eventually, she tries to persuade him to change his expectations, “but it’s almost impossible. And then I start to lose interest.” Once I asked Yeeun to show me how she does it, how exactly she lives up to a potential boyfriend’s expectations across the table at dinner. She put the back of her hand to her mouth and giggled softly, but then quickly put her hand down in disgust. “I can’t do it anymore.” She’s clear in her mind that she wants a child, but marriage? “I’m afraid of it.” Her mother, Yeeun guesses, was unhappy with her father because she was ignored. “He prioritized his ideas over hers, and she couldn’t accomplish her dreams.”

Yeeun is not one of the spoiled, entitled women of Ewha university. The daughter of an army chaplain who has known hard times, she has “always felt a certain desperation to boost myself up.” When she was a little girl, her mother told her she should grow up to be an “international leader” or a “female CEO,” without really knowing what that meant. Her parents did not speak English and never
traveled out of the country. She improved her English largely by watching Disney videotapes. Yeeun claims that she was at the bottom of her class in high school, and it was only after she started debating that “I changed my dream,” she says. “I started to recognize myself as someone who can win over many great, intelligent people in debating. So, I told my father that I wanted to be a more successful woman.”

How would a husband fit into her new dream? “I’m afraid he might restrict my lifestyle and the goals I want to pursue,” she says. “If I get married and live a very unhappy life, what is the point?”

The headline appeared across a full-page ad in several Korean newspapers in 2009. The text of the ad read like a private diary, or some kind of written confession or cry for help. The plea was unsigned, and many people who read it assumed that it was a clever campaign for some new deodorant or makeup or one of the daytime soap operas that run on Korean television. But there was a little too much realism in the ad, and not all that much romance.

Eventually the Korean media made their way to the author, thirty-six-year-old Hwang Myeong-eun, who took out the ad with her own money for exactly the reasons she wrote: She was “desperate,” she told me when we met in her office in the winter. At the time, Hwang’s son was four, and she was the chief financial officer at a major advertising firm in Korea. She was working sixteen-hour days, leaving before her son woke up and coming home after he was in bed every day. She was making more money than her husband, but this fact went unacknowledged between them, and did not change the usual household dynamics. He never helped out at home, and she was still the one who got the scolding calls from the mother-in law: “Have you forgotten today is the day of your father-in-law’s memorial service? Your other family members are already here. I understand you are talented and all, but do you ever fulfill your family obligations?” What eventually broke her, Hwang told me, was the morning her son woke up before she left for work and caught her as she was walking out the door. He wanted to sing her his favorite song before she left, “and I had to cut him off in the middle. I had to leave.”

Working mothers the world over may complain, but in Korea the pressures on them are unimaginable. Work hours in Korea are the second longest of any advanced nation, after Japan. Office workers typically stay until eight or nine at night, and then are usually expected to go out drinking with their colleagues or clients—the Korean extreme-sport version of bonding and networking. As women have begun flooding the workforce, they have disrupted these elaborate post-work rituals, but they haven’t fundamentally transformed them. The drinking sessions still involve several rounds of high-proof
soju,
a sweet, vodka-like drink. Employees are asked on applications how many bottles of
soju
they can down in a session,
and the newly ambitious working women feel pressure to keep up with the boys. Sometimes the colleagues will decamp to a “salon,” a Hooters-like club where sexy waitresses serve the drinks. Most of the working women peel off at this point, but a few sigh and follow along, then spend the night sitting awkwardly with the group or trying to make conversation with the waitresses.

Asian society is stereotyped as family centered, but the stereotype only applies in an era where women stayed home full-time. Workplaces in much of Asia are distinctly incompatible with any kind of home life. Flextime or part-time arrangements are unheard of, and women are usually reluctant to take advantage of maternity leave for more than a month or two. At the same time, the domestic burdens on a Korean wife haven’t changed much since the turn of the century: She is expected to cook, clean the house herself, and take care of both sets of in-laws. And in the modern era of ultra-competitive schooling, she also has to manage her children’s unbelievably complicated roster of extracurricular activities. And have I mentioned that nannies are frowned upon? Mothers use them, but always with apologies, and often they end up cobbling together child care using the more acceptable combination of relatives and trusted neighbors.

Hwang is an unlikely person to have become a poster girl for the impossible situation of the modern Korean woman. She is pretty in an old-fashioned, feminine way, with a perfect bob framing her delicate face, and the day I met her she had light blue nails that perfectly matched her cashmere sweater. She seems reserved and cautious and not at all the type to opt for a public confession. But somebody had to do it. Korea does not have a tell-all kind of culture. There is no equivalent of
Oprah
or
The View,
no public space for girlfriends to keep it real. Magazines are not full of wrenching essays by young
women frustrated by the dating scene or working mothers agonized by the time squeeze. Self-help and chick-lit have only penetrated the publishing market in the last couple of years. When newspapers mention the dilemmas of the new alpha girls, they generally enlist experts to supply withering diagnoses of their psychological weaknesses: “obsessed with having to excel in everything and more likely to form unsuitable relationships,” or “unconsciously dislike men they have to compete with, so they gravitate toward men with lowlier jobs than theirs or even no job at all.”