The Relationship Between Gender Equality and Birth Rates, and My Thoughts

Originally published on July 10, 2023 on a previous platform; I am reposting it here with some additional personal commentary.

As I was mindlessly scrolling through Facebook as usual, I came across a post being shared under the title, “An unequal world will naturally collapse.”

The post had around 700 likes and had been shared more than 100 times, but I sighed the moment I saw the title. It was the same old story I had seen countless times before. The gist was that Korea’s low birth rate and population decline stem from inequality between men and women (the glass ceiling, income gaps, etc.) and from the imbalance between Seoul and the regions. It also took a jab at right-wing male YouTubers, saying they are wrong to explain these phenomena through women’s supposed instinct to “marry up.”

First of all, regardless of my political leaning (I consider myself liberal), I do think women’s tendency to marry up exists quite naturally—but that’s not the key issue I want to focus on here.

The table above compares per capita national income and fertility rates. You can see that, in general, countries with higher per capita income tend to have lower fertility rates, while those with lower per capita income tend to have higher fertility rates. Setting aside extreme outliers like Qatar, lower-income countries also tend to have lower gender equality indices. So if we only look at statistical patterns, gender equality appears to be highly correlated with lower birth rates.

However, it would be a stretch to claim that gender equality itself is the sole cause of declining birth rates based on this level of evidence. One of the strongest confounding variables is income.

From a purely logical standpoint, it seems obvious that as women’s average income rises and their participation in economic activity increases (i.e., as gender equality advances), fertility rates will fall. But logic is just one tool for explaining the world, so we have no choice but to bring in the data.

More recently, another hypothesis has emerged: economic development and the accompanying move toward gender equality initially push fertility rates down (South Korea and China are the clearest examples of this), but once a society has already reached a high income level, further advances in gender equality can actually raise fertility. This is the so-called “U-shaped curve” hypothesis.

When we categorize WPEI (Women’s Political Empowerment Index, hereafter “gender equality index”) by time period, we find that fertility rates were high in the past regardless of gender equality levels, and that modern fertility rates have declined across the board. Except for the period after the 2000s, the data show a negative correlation between the gender equality index and fertility rates.

If we look only at the results after 2000, we see that countries with higher gender equality indices record slightly higher fertility rates. This is why the “U-shaped curve” hypothesis once enjoyed support in parts of academia. Even UN research bodies have mentioned it, which tells you how many people were excited by the idea.

Nonetheless, the “U-shaped curve” hypothesis has failed to gain broad acceptance, and the table below helps explain why.

The second table compares gender equality indices and fertility rates across countries, so it does not show how fertility changed within each country as gender equality progressed over time. The table above does show this. The countries included there all saw their gender equality indices rise over time, and as they did, fertility rates fell, tracing a reverse J-curve.

In other words, within a given country, a rising gender equality index over time is highly correlated with a decline in fertility.

Among advanced economies, the United States is relatively high in terms of fertility, so let’s take a look at its case. The U.S. total fertility rate was 57.8 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

The graph above compares fertility rates by race. It shows that white women have the lowest fertility rate at 55.3 births, while Hispanic women have the highest at 64.8. The fact that Hispanic women have the highest fertility rate implies that immigrants contribute significantly to overall fertility.

This graph shows that one-quarter of immigrants in the United States are from Mexico (Hispanic). In other immigration-friendly countries such as France, immigrants (often Muslim) also play a large role in driving up fertility rates.

To sum up:

The reason I wrote the above is that many people fundamentally misdiagnose the low birthrate problem, and as a result the state keeps allocating resources to areas that are effectively meaningless.

According to the newspaper Hankyoreh, the government spent a total of 280 trillion won on low birthrate policies between 2006 and 2021, yet fertility has continued to fall even as the budget has grown every year. Arguing that this can be explained simply by gender equality issues or the concentration of people in Seoul is, in my view, like claiming you can solve a complex differential equation with basic arithmetic.

The primary reason Korea’s fertility rate is so low is that fewer men and women are getting married. Because of Korea’s conservative cultural norms, the share of births outside marriage is extremely low, so if people do not marry, that directly translates into not having children.

The crude marriage rate, which measures the number of marriages per 1,000 people, fell from 6.0 in 2014 to 3.8 in 2023—a drop of more than one-third in just ten years.

In Korea, if you want to have children in the conventional way, a man and a woman need to meet and marry. But even among those who do marry, the average age keeps rising, so the fertility rate among married couples is bound to fall. Women’s peak fertility is in their mid-20s, and it declines sharply from the mid-30s. As of 2023, the average age at first marriage was 34 for men and 31.5 for women, up about 1.8–1.9 years for both compared with a decade earlier. As men and women age, the quality of sperm and eggs declines, which lowers fertility, and the risks associated with late childbirth are even more severe for women. Childbirth after age 35 is classified as advanced maternal age, which means that for the average Korean woman, there are only about 3.5 optimal years to have children after she marries. That is barely enough time to have and raise even one child.

So if we want to raise the fertility rate, the first problem we need to solve is getting men and women to marry in the first place. Why does the marriage rate keep falling? A number of reasons come to mind: rising expectations among young people about what marriage should look like, gender conflict, high youth unemployment, delayed entry into the workforce, and more.

I see the fundamental cause of Korea’s low fertility rate as a lack of respect. Most of the reasons mentioned above stem from a culture of constant comparison and ranking people by conditions. The revenues of matchmaking agencies that grade people almost like cuts of beef—based on looks and external attributes such as job and income, and then arrange meetings premised on marriage—are growing every year, and research (which they themselves funded, so we should take it with a grain of salt) claims that those who marry through such services report higher marital satisfaction than others. Dating apps that match men primarily by job and economic power and women by appearance are also popular. Economics gets many things wrong, and often, but from an economic perspective the growth of these industries clearly tells us this: people derive a great deal of utility from what they see as “relationships and marriages where I don’t get the short end of the stick.”

Young people in Korea keep “preparing” and letting time pass—because they are afraid of starting married life without an apartment, of marrying someone who does not meet all their criteria, of holding a diploma from a university that others do not recognize (or of not having a diploma at all), or of beginning their career at an unknown small or mid-sized company. I have watched countless children spend their school years preparing to get into a prestigious university and department, then spend their college years preparing to land a job at a big-name conglomerate, and then move on to preparing for a licensed profession that guarantees social status. It is natural for some children to dream of becoming a doctor or another profession that offers a relatively secure life, but a society where everyone’s dream is to become a doctor is, in some way, distorted.

To truly make my life my own, we certainly need the “courage to be disliked,” but I think we have also entered an era where it is just as important to have a “respectful heart,” regardless of someone’s background. Because it is hard to be brave if you are the only one trying.