Last year, when South Korea’s president began his campaign to abolish the country’s gender equality ministry – many women got angry.

Rightly so. Wouldn’t you be angry if your leader said feminism was the reason men and women don’t have “healthy relationships”?

The gender pay gap in the country is staggering, sitting at about 31 per cent, according to a report from the OECD. It’s one of the worst gender pay gaps of any developed country in the world.

In South Korea, just 18.6 per cent of parliamentary positions are held by women. Discrimination against women is pervasive and widely evidenced through decades worth of research and studies.

It leaves us to wonder – did feminism even reach South Korea?

Over the last nine months, a huge movement has stirred in the country among its female population and women have stepped up, refusing to stay silent.

A growing number of women are refusing to get married and become parents. The movement has spurred its own name: “4B,” or “The 4 No’s”, where its followers refuse to date men, refuse heterosexual marriage and are not having children.

Let’s take a look at the reality of the lives of South Korea’s women.


Working conditions
South Korea is an explicitly patriarchal society. This means that working women face archaic attitudes while doing their jobs – they face harassment and abuse, and even receive encouragement from their workplaces to quit their jobs after becoming pregnant.

Just 55 per cent of Korean women are employed in the workforce. Meanwhile, South Korea ranked 99th among 146 countries in last year’s World Economic Forum gender gap report.


Domestic duties and parenthood
Women are still expected to shoulder the vast majority of domestic labour in households across South Korea.

Countless empirical and cultural studies have shown the oppression women face in households, being confined to very narrow gendered roles. And married women bear the brunt of childcare and household chores.

One study from 2017 found that wives spent more than three hours on chores daily, compared to their husbands – who spent an average of 54 minutes.

Violence against women
Beyond the many ways women experience oppression in South Korea, perhaps the worst is the pervasive violence enacted against them by men.

According to the Korea Women’s Hotline in 2021, one woman was murdered or targeted for murder every 1.4 days or less. A government study from last year revealed that 1 in 3 adult women have experienced violence, with perpetrators often being current or former intimate partners.

Because pornography is banned in the country, women constantly face the threat of being captured without their knowledge or consent from secret spy cameras that are often installed in conspicuous locations – like hotel rooms and female change rooms.

This epidemic of spy cameras – called ‘molka’ – has driven women to be publicly shamed, as the videos are often shared through chat rooms, and distributed privately. Some women have lost their jobs as a result, while others have even taken their own lives.


Pressure to conform to beauty standards
Outdated beliefs towards women and how they should present themselves also means that many young girls and women are sculpting how they look to fit the ‘expected mould’.

The cosmetic surgery industry is one of the most lucrative in the world – making up almost a quarter of all total procedures in the world.

Young teenagers are undergoing cosmetic surgery to appear a certain way. In fact, one study found that at least one in five South Korean women have had some form of facial cosmetic surgery.