South Korea has been undergoing unprecedented ultra-low birth rate for the last 20 years and now showing the lowest birth rate among the OECD countries. Above all, Seoul recorded 0.94 on total birth rate in 2016, becoming city with lowest total birth rate in the country. And also the number of the birth has been decreased 42.7% in last 16 years, which is the lowest number of the birth in history. Because of the extremely low birth rate, the population of mega-city, Seoul, has been decreased to 99.3 million, and the city is currently facing various social/economic problems such as decrease in vitality of the city, contraction of market, and increase in old-age dependency ratio. Especially woman’s economic activity in major advanced countries with strong work and family balance system shows significantly positive results, however in the case of woman of Seoul city, it shows considerably negative results. From recognizing this as a social issue, in this study, we regard woman’s work and family balance system as the core of low birth rate problem, and suggest the counterplan for the future.
We divided work environment, work and family balance, gender-equal care in family, and economic statues of 600 married women in Seoul into public and private sector and compared/analyzed them. The key result of the analysis is as follows. Average number of children of woman in Seoul was 1.21 however the desired number of children was 1.74, showing that they want more children than they have. Although the analysis shows that difficulty in work and family balance, financial burden, and social disadvantage of pregnancy/child birth are main causes making it hard to plan additional offspring. 69.3% of married woman works average 52 hours (long time work) per week and especially married woman working in public sector works average 55.2 hours per week. The main causes of long time work are their boss, disadvantage in performance evaluation, and office culture. Moreover, 56.4% of the women experienced discrimination because of their pregnancy/child birth, and it appeared majorly as discrimination in performance evaluation/promotion, advised resign/unfair dismissal, and unilateral relocation to different department or position unrelated to her existing job. And even in double income families, woman exclusively take care of their children alone, making it harder to balance between their work and family.
This study suggests prohibition on discrimination of pregnancy/child birth, reconsidering work family balance system, constructing child care infrastructure, improvement on existing projects, and fund raising for low income newlyweds, based on above results.