SEOUL — It’s a worldwide shift that has taken political scientists and sociologists without warning: the rising ideological divide between younger women and men.
Within the latest U.S. presidential election, President Trump gained 56% of the vote amongst males ages 18 to 29, in line with an evaluation from Tufts College’s Heart for Info & Analysis on Civic Studying and Engagement.
In Germany, younger males are twice as probably as younger ladies to help the far-right Different for Germany celebration, or AfD, in line with the Pew Analysis Heart. Final yr’s European Parliament elections confirmed the same development. In accordance with the European Coverage Heart, in Portugal, Denmark and Croatia, greater than 4 younger males voted for far-right candidates for each younger lady who did the identical.
However few international locations exemplify the development greater than South Korea, the place a latest presidential election confirmed simply how polarized its youth has turn into.
In South Korea, 74.1% of males of their 20s and 60.3% of males of their 30s voted for one of many two conservative candidates in contrast with 35.6% and 40.5% of their feminine counterparts, respectively.
Consultants say the so-called 2030 male (males of their 20s and 30s) phenomenon, which emerged alongside the mainstreaming of gender equality discourse in South Korea over the past decade, has defied conventional left-right taxonomies.
The “2030 men are difficult to define under standard electoral theory frameworks,” mentioned Kim Yeun-sook, a political scientist at Seoul Nationwide College’s Institute of Korean Political Research.
Having come of age in a world with radically completely different social contracts than these of their mother and father, right-leaning 2030 male voters are much less more likely to give attention to North Korea — a defining preoccupation for older conservatives — than on feminism, which for them has turn into a unclean phrase that conjures “freeloading” ladies making an attempt to take greater than they’re owed.
The lads have taken umbrage with visible symbols or hand gestures — resembling a pinched forefinger and thumb — that they argue are anti-male canine whistles utilized by feminists, in some instances succeeding in getting firms to discontinue advertising and marketing campaigns that includes such offending content material.
South Korean ladies supporting the #MeToo motion stage a rally to mark the upcoming Worldwide Girls’s Day in Seoul on March 4, 2018.
(Ahn Younger-joon / Related Press)
Within the 2022 presidential election, it was males of their 20s and 30s who helped Yoon Suk Yeol — the conservative candidate who claimed that structural sexism not existed — clinch a razor-thin victory over his liberal opponent, Lee Jae-myung, who was elected president in June.
This notion that males — not ladies — are the true victims of gender discrimination in up to date society is a defining perception for a lot of younger South Korean males, says Chun Gwan-yul, a knowledge journalist and the creator of “20-something Male,” a ebook in regards to the phenomenon that attracts on in depth authentic polling of younger South Koreans.
Though male backlash to up to date feminism is probably the most seen facet of the phenomenon, Kim Chang-hwan, a sociologist on the College of Kansas, says that its roots return to socioeconomic modifications that started a lot earlier.
Amongst them was a collection of presidency insurance policies three a long time earlier that led to a surge in each female and male faculty enrollment, which soared from round 30% of the final inhabitants in 1990 to 75% in 2024. Add to that the more and more long-term participation of girls within the workforce, Kim mentioned, and “the supply of educated labor has ended up outpacing economic growth.”
“The young men of today are now feeling like they are having to compete five times harder than the previous generation,” he mentioned.
(Although gender inequality in South Korea’s job market is among the many worst within the Group for Financial Cooperation and Improvement, with ladies making on common round 65% of their male counterparts and way more more likely to be precariously employed, such wage gaps are usually much less outstanding for earners of their 20s.)
And though most analysis has proven that the detrimental impact of South Korea’s male-only obligatory navy service — which lasts as much as 21 months — on wages and employment is minimal, anxieties about getting a later begin than ladies in a hypercompetitive job market have additionally contributed to younger South Korean males feeling that they’re getting a uncooked deal.
Chun, the info journalist, factors out that the mass entry of girls into greater training additionally led to a different tectonic shift being felt by the present crop of younger males: the speedy collapse of conventional marriage dynamics.
“Women have been doing the math and are increasingly concluding marriage is a net loss for them,” he mentioned. “South Korea transformed from a society where marriage was universal into a marriage-is-optional one in an incredibly short time frame, especially compared to many Western countries where those changes played out over 60 or 70 years.”
In 2000, simply 19% of South Koreans between the ages of 30 and 34 have been single, however immediately that quantity is 56%, in line with authorities information. Over a 3rd of girls between 25 and 49 years outdated now say they don’t ever wish to get married, in contrast with 13% of males, in line with a authorities survey final yr. One in 4 males will now stay single of their 40s.
South Korean ladies participate in a rally to mark Worldwide Girls’s Day in downtown Seoul on March 8, 2024.
(Jung Yeon-je/ AFP/Getty Pictures)
Chun notes that the mismatch within the marriage panorama has bred in lots of the misogynistic resentment related to incels, a time period for males who determine as involuntarily celibate. A typical chorus amongst younger conservative males is the swearing-off of South Korean ladies, who are sometimes solid as “kimchi women” — gold diggers who’re unwilling to tug their weight whereas demanding an excessive amount of of males.
“Do you need to only date Korean women just because you’re Korean? No,” mentioned Chul Gu, a web based persona widespread amongst younger males in a latest stream. “There are Thai women, Russian women, women of all nationalities. There is no need to suffer the stress of dating a Korean kimchi woman.”
Resentment towards South Korean ladies, Chun says, is inseparable from the generational animus that feeds it.
“In the worldview of young South Korean men, they aren’t just fighting women, they are fighting the older generation that is siding with those women,” he mentioned. “It’s essentially an anti-establishment ethos.”
The “586 generation,” as they’re generally referred to as, are South Koreans of their 50s or 60s who got here of age in the course of the high-growth, authoritarian interval of the Nineteen Eighties. Related to the pro-democracy actions of the time, the 586 era is among the most liberal and pro-gender equality demographics in South Korea — and one whose members constructed a lot of their wealth by way of low cost actual property, an avenue not obtainable for almost all of younger South Koreans accustomed to seeing housing costs in Seoul double in as little as 4 years.
“Young South Koreans are seeing those homes become worth millions,” Chun mentioned. “Meanwhile, South Korea’s birth rate is falling and life expectancy is rising to 80 or 90, so many young voters are thinking, ‘We’re going to have to be responsible for them for the next 40 to 50 years.’”
Among the many candidates in final month’s presidential election, it was Lee Jun-seok, a 40-year-old third-party conservative candidate, who most aggressively focused these tensions.
Throughout his marketing campaign, Lee promised to segregate South Korea’s fast-depleting nationwide pension by age, a transfer he mentioned would relieve youthful South Koreans of the burden of subsidizing the older era’s retirement.
Though he completed with simply 8% of the whole vote, he gained the biggest share — 37.2% — of the 20-something male vote, and 25.8% from males of their 30s.
“South Korea is very much locked into a two-party system where it is generally rare to see a third party candidate make much of a difference,” Kim, the political scientist, mentioned. “I think there’s a lot of negative polarization at play — an expression of defeatism or disenfranchisement at the fact that status quo politicians aren’t addressing young men’s problems.”
Knowledge present that disillusionment with democracy too runs deep.
In accordance with a latest survey of 1,514 South Koreans by the East Asia Institute, a Seoul-based suppose tank, simply 62.6% of South Korean males between the ages of 18 and 29 imagine that democracy is the perfect political system — the bottom share in any age and gender group — with practically 1 / 4 believing {that a} dictatorship can generally be extra preferable.
Whether or not the rightward drift of younger South Korean males is a short lived deviation or a extra severe forecast for South Korea’s democracy continues to be an open query, in line with Kim.
“But now is the time to act,” she mentioned. “There absolutely needs to be a political response to the younger generations’ frustrations.”
