South Korea has been experiencing a constant decline in its fertility rate. In 2022, the fertility rate dropped to 0.778—far below the replacement level—rendering South Korea the country with the lowest fertility rate in the world.¹ In response to this demographic challenge, the South Korean government has adopted an incentivization strategy, including extending parental leave to 18 months for both parents and paying 2 million won (approximately $1,510) bonuses to families upon the birth of a child.²

Similar to the case of Russia, it is also hard to draw a conclusion on whether the incentivization effort will actually succeed in South Korea, given that the policy was announced recently. However, it is unlikely to be a complete success when considering the persistent gendered norms in both the workplace and the family setting.

In the workplace, although women have a relatively high educational attainment rate, they are underrepresented in leadership roles across almost all economic sectors and often receive only 64.6% of the wages earned by their male counterparts.³ When it comes to the division of labor within families, women are often perceived as the obligatory caregivers who are expected to perform unpaid childcare work, while men are largely exempt from family chores. As a result, although South Korea has been offering paid parental leave to both men and women, only 4.1% of eligible South Korean men actually take time off work after their child is born,⁴ indicating that the unequal gender division of labor between parents still remains significant.

Human Rights Watch, "South Korean Women Are Fed Up with Inequality," 2018.^8.

Therefore, it is fair to say that whether the incentivization strategy will actually work out in South Korea depends on whether well-educated women, who are not likely to enter marriage and have children and are thus the population that this policy supposedly targets, believe that a payment amounting to approximately the average monthly income of South Korean women (2.71 million won)⁶ is worth the potential opportunity costs they will face in a workplace environment that already does not favor women, alongside the unpaid labor of childcare that will likely fall entirely on them. It is, again, hard to reach a definite conclusion at this time, but the success of the policy is likely to remain limited as long as gendered norms and the gender-based division of labor persist.