On a rainy Tuesday afternoon, Yejin is cooking lunch for her friends at her apartment, where she lives alone on the outskirts of Seoul, happily single.
While they eat, one of them pulls up a well-worn meme of a cartoon dinosaur on her phone. “Be careful,” the dinosaur says. “Don’t let yourself become extinct like us.”
The women all laugh.
“It’s funny, but it’s dark, because we know we could be causing our own extinction,” says Yejin, a 30-year-old television producer.
Neither she, nor any of her friends, are planning on having children. They are part of a growing community of women choosing the child-free life.
South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, beating its own staggeringly low record year after year.
Figures released on Wednesday show it fell by another 8% in 2023 to 0.72.
This refers to the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. For a population to hold steady, that number should be 2.1.
If this trend continues, Korea’s population is estimated to halve by the year 2100.
A ‘national emergency’
Globally, developed countries are seeing birth rates fall, but none in such an extreme way as South Korea.
Its projections are grim.
In 50 years time, the number of working age people will have halved, the pool eligible to take part in the country’s mandatory military service will have shrunk by 58%, and nearly half the population will be older than 65.
This bodes so badly for the country’s economy, pension pot, and security that politicians have declared it “a national emergency”.
For nearly 20 years, successive governments have thrown money at the problem – 379.8 trillion KRW ($286bn; £226bn) to be exact.
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Couples who have children are showered with cash, from monthly handouts to subsidised housing and free taxis. Hospital bills and even IVF treatments are covered, though only for those who are married.
Such financial incentives have not worked, leading politicians to brainstorm more “creative” solutions, like hiring nannies from South East Asia and paying them below minimum wage, and exempting men from serving in the military service if they have three children before turning 30.
Unsurprisingly, policymakers have been accused of not listening to young people – especially women – about their needs. And so, over the past year we have travelled around the country, speaking to women to understand the reasons behind their decision not to have children.
When Yejin decided to live alone in her mid-20s, she defied social norms – in Korea, single living is largely considered a temporary phase in one’s life.
Then five years ago, she decided not to get married, and not to have children.
“It’s hard to find a dateable man in Korea – one who will share the chores and the childcare equally,” she tells me, “And women who have babies alone are not judged kindly.”
In 2022, only 2% of births in South Korea occurred outside of marriage.
‘A perpetual cycle of work’
Instead, Yejin has chosen to focus on her career in television, which, she argues, doesn’t allow her enough time to raise a child anyway. Korean work hours are notoriously long.
Yejin works a traditional 9-6 job (the Korean equivalent of a 9-5) but says she usually doesn’t leave the office until 8pm and there is overtime on top of that. Once she gets home, she only has time to clean the house or exercise before bed.
“I love my job, it brings me so much fulfilment,” she says. “But working in Korea is hard, you’re stuck in a perpetual cycle of work.”
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Yejin says there is also pressure to study in her spare time, to get better at her job: “Koreans have this mindset that if you don’t continuously work on self-improvement, you’re going to get left behind, and become a failure. This fear makes us work twice as hard.”
“Sometimes at the weekends I go and get an IV drip, just to get enough energy to go back to work on Monday,” she adds casually, as if this were a fairly normal weekend activity.
She also shares the same fear of every woman I spoke to – that if she were to take time off to have a child, she might not be able to return to work.
“There is an implicit pressure from companies that when we have children, we must leave our jobs,” she says. She has watched it happen to her sister and her two favourite news presenters.
‘I know too much’
One 28-year-old woman, who worked in HR, said she’d seen people who were forced to leave their jobs or who were passed over for promotions after taking maternity leave, which had been enough to convince her never to have a baby.
Both men and women are entitled to a year’s leave during the first eight years of their child’s life. But in 2022, only 7% of new fathers used some of their leave, compared to 70% of new mothers.
Korean women are the most highly educated of those in OECD countries, and yet the country has the worst gender pay gap and a higher-than-average proportion of women out of work compared to men.
Researchers say this proves they are being presented with a trade-off – have a career or have a family. Increasingly, they are choosing a career.
I met Stella Shin at an afterschool club, where she teaches five-year-olds English.
“Look at the children. They’re so cute,” she cooed. But at 39, Stella does not have children of her own. It was not an active decision, she says.
She has been married for six years, and both she and her husband wanted a child but were so busy working and enjoying themselves that time slipped away. Now she has accepted that her lifestyle makes it “impossible”.
“Mothers need to quit work to look after their child full time for the first two years, and this would make me very depressed,” she said. “I love my career and taking care of myself.”
In her spare time Stella attends K-pop dance classes with a group of older women.
This expectation that women take two to three years off work when they have a child is common among women. When I asked Stella whether she could share the parental leave with her husband, she dismissed me with a look.
“It’s like when I make him do the dishes and he always misses a bit, I couldn’t rely on him,” she said.
Even if she wanted to give up work, or juggle a family and a career, she said she could not afford to because the cost of housing is too high.