It can be a real challenge sometimes finding the insider knowledge I use to pretend I’m smart, let alone knowing what to make of it. Fortunately, I can rely on these sources to provide both!
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, plus 15-minute video. Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.
Without any further ado, the first blog is Connecting the Data Dots by Ssen Kim, which has many excellent short posts in English.
Alas, there seems to be no information about the author. But I do know that in the very first post of theirs I read, “Has The M-shaped Curve Of South Korea’s Female Employment Rate Disappeared?“, they not only directly addressed a question I’ve long been worried about getting called out on, they’d even provided some handy graphs for me to distract my accusers with too.
So last winter, while preparing this semester’s Korean Gender Studies class, I realized I just had to use them. But as the day of this week’s lecture on the birthrate approached, a crisis loomed. While I found the topic very interesting, and you will when you read that post too, I started considereing it from the perspective of my already disengaged young students. Still scarred from growing up during COVID, and barely older than children themselves, would they find the topic of why Koreans aren’t having children completely irrelevant to them? Arcane even?
What to do?
Then Kurzgesagt’s chilling new video below was recommended to me a couple of weeks ago. Not only would it make a welcome change for my students from me, but I’d welcome the rare opportunity to put my feet up in class too. And that next, with the broad outlines of the topic already covered, I could smoothly transition into focusing on one specific part of it thereafter. Namely, by answering Kim’s question over the remaining half hour.
It turned out, Ssen Kim would write an interesting quick response to the video too, looking at new ways Korea’s population is getting counted. But did I mention I’d be focusing? So, let me just pass on one of my other main sources for that half hour: the editorial “Amidst Gender Gaps in South Korea’s Labor Market: The Motherhood Trap” by Researcher Consultant Min-ji Kang of the Center for Transnational Migration and Social Inclusion at Seoul National University. Also relatively short, but jam-packed with statistics and graphs to steal (with attribution!), you probably couldn’t ask for a more recent and accessible source on the Korean M-curve in English.
I’m sure you won’t be able to resist Kang’s link to her own main source too though: Why Gender Disparities Persist in South Korea’s Labor Market, a July 2022, juicy 41-page working paper by Karen Dynan, Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, and Anna Stansbury of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Meanwhile, the second blog is Sovidence (from “sociological evidence”), by University of Kansas Sociology Professor Chang-hwan Kim. Specializing in labor markets, inequality, stratification, and Asian American Studies in addition to Korea Studies, at first glance my recommendation may seem a little strange. As not only are his posts dense, comprehensive, and about many topics unrelated to Korea, they also happen to be entirely in Korean:
With these days’ translation plugins in your browsers though, they’re very readable. You do still need some Korean language ability to pick up on the inevitable mistakes here and there, but generally they’re more than adequate to get the gist:
And by sharing that with you, I’ve also just learned myself that he has an English account on Twitter, in addition to his Korean one focusing on his Korean blogposts. Again, about many other topics unrelated to the peninsula, but still very interesting.
(Yes, I know no-one uses that phrase anymore! That was the point!)
Finally, just a quick apology for long break again. This time, it’s been almost entirely due to this course. Technically many years since I’ve taught the subject, over the winter I updated all my lectures, anticipating that in March I’d get my typical mix of 25 or so exchange students, all fluent in English, all in their early-20s, and almost entirely women. Instead, I got 25 first-year Korean students, ranging from fluent to understanding virtually nothing I say whatsoever, and almost entirely men.
The shift from mostly female to male students wasn’t an issue of course. And, although it’s definitely different teaching 18 year-olds compared to 21+ year-olds (a few years makes a big difference at that age), who remember absolutely nothing of all the social studies they learned in school, it’s been easy to simplify the content accordingly.
Why students who can’t speak English would pick my course though, and why they’ll inevitably blame me for all their difficulties when it comes round to writing their student evaluations, are very good questions. But whatever their answers, I’m the one having to deal with the consequences.
Suffice to say that as the semester progressed, I came to realize most of my work over the winter had been wasted, and that I’d have to redo my lectures from scratch. Hence these past seven weeks or so, this one course has easily involved more work than my four ESL ones combined (at least double even), eating into all my time available for writing. But almost halfway through the semester now, I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ve finally gotten the hang of things.
And, now that I have, I’ll be able to start passing on some of the things I’ve learned from it soon!
Related Posts:
- Recent Studies Show it’s Hands-On Fathers That Have More Children, NOT Fictitious Alpha Males. The Implications for Raising Birthrates are Clear.
- Why Feminism? Because Stalking Victims Need Protection, the Gender Pension Gap Needs Fixing, and Enough Jokes Already About Big Boobs?
- The Hidden Roots of Korea’s Gender Wars
- How Slut-Shaming and Victim-Blaming Begin in Korean Schools
- Manufacturing Consent?: Socializing Migrant Brides to Korea into Becoming Docile, Obedient ‘Baby-Making Machines’
- “I am a Woman Who Buys Condoms.”
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
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