Women’s employment and fertility in Korea

This literature review examines Korea's declining fertility rate in the past few decades, seeking to understand the interactions between women's employment, fertility, and associated policies, and making findings from Korean-language literature more accessible to an international audience. It reviews studies covering the demographic process of declining birth rates, women's labour supply, gender discrimination, and the effects of family policies aimed at making it easier to combine women's employment and childbirth. Women have over time gradually moved towards prioritising work over family when facing conflicts between the two. In the decades up until around 2010 women increasingly delayed marriage and childbirth and reduced the number of children over their lifetimes, but almost all women eventually got married and had at least one child. From the 2010s, more women choose to remain unmarried or married and childless. Family policies like childcare and parental leave have not been sufficient to make work and childrearing compatible in general and have therefore not had the desired effects on fertility and female employment. The effects of policy interventions vary based on factors like women's labour market position and access to support programmes like quality childcare. The analysis indicates that until employment and motherhood can be combined in a reasonable way for most women, the alternative cost of motherhood will remain high and fertility will remain low or fall even further.