Prof. Jisoo Hwang

It's a crazy number.

It's a number that I think people, I mean, all Koreans know the number now because they saw it in the news so much.

But it's still a number that it's difficult to imagine because we just never lived in a society with a 0.75 fertility rate.

More and more of the highly educated women were not getting married.

And now that I think about it, that was like the precursor to all of this happening.

So the term gold miss, I'm not the one who coined it.

It was becoming a popular word in Korea to refer to women who are highly educated.

So they're gold.

They're highly educated and they have high potential earnings.

They already have high paying jobs, but they're a miss.

So they didn't get married.

And that's because, you know, our norms about, you know, what it means to be a good mother or a good wife or a good worker, you know, these kind of social norms, they can't change that quickly.

So it's not, like, someone's fault.

Oh.

It's not like, so even if your husband is, for example, very supportive and he has very, you know, egalitarian gender attitudes, it may still not work because like the whole society, all the institutions around us are not designed to, you know, operate with both mom and dad working full time.

So for example, in Korea, elementary school, first grade, second grade, they come home at 1 p.m.

So someone has to be home for the kid.

Yes.

So from a country where almost no women were college graduates, now more than half of the women are college graduates.

We are all given 24 hours a day.