Blythe Terrell

So Jisoo noticed this with her friends, actually, she told me.

She was like, oh, a lot of them have gone to college, maybe gotten good jobs, but they were staying single.

And in Korea, there was actually a name for a woman like this.

She was called a gold miss.

Yeah, right.

So Jisoo, when she started digging into this, she realized that a lot of this trend of women not getting married, really low fertility, it seemed to be related to this massive change that had happened in South Korea's economy.

Okay.

So if you look back, like, 50-plus years ago, South Korea was a really, really poor country.

But then it really shifted.

Like, the country starts building up its industry, starts exporting a ton of stuff.

There's lots of South Korean companies that are super successful global companies.

K-pop.

Yes, yeah, K-pop is a part of this.

Definitely a part of this.

So all of this economic growth, all of this change, it also meant that, like, way more women started getting educated and getting jobs.

In some cases, really demanding jobs, really long hours.

So there was this, like, big shift in women's roles in the workforce, workplace.

Uh-huh.

Okay.

But Jisoo told me that as this education and workplace shift was happening, what they did not see...