South Korea has recently proposed extending the work week to 69 hours, which was aimed at creating greater flexibility for families.
However, Korean women say the move would only entrench traditional gender roles as they are faced with the problem of creating a work-life balance in a culture stacked against them, especially for working mothers.
For Kim Sae Hee, it was a choice between doing what she loved at work and managing family life. She and her husband wanted to have a couple of kids as they assumed they could manage their careers.
"When I went back to work, the idea of having a second child completely disappeared," she admitted.
Going childless to pursue a career
Sae Hee's story was not an isolated case of a woman making the hard decision to choose between a career and family life.
Interior architecture university student Song Yeon Jeong has already decided to go childless due to fears of having children taking too much away from her career ambitions.
"I would have to take a break from work [after childbirth] to take care of my children," she said.
Yeon Jeong was also concerned with the high cost of living in Seoul, which is on the verge of having an affordability crisis for housing.
But going childless has its own setbacks.
In 2022, South Korea had the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.78 children for every woman of childbearing age, and the figure will continue to decline in the next few years.
The country officially passed the "death cross" in 2020, recording more deaths than births that year.
Unless the country boosts its migration, it would need to triple its fertility rate to 2.1 to keep the population stable.
Longer work hours and the gender wage gap
South Korea's population decline is also linked to its other big problem of long work hours.
Currently, the country already has some of the longest working hours among OCED nations, only ranking behind Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Chile.
The nation's highly competitive and rigid work culture meant employees worked beyond standard legal hours to get ahead.
South Koreans are allowed to work 40 hours a week and an additional 12 hours overtime after it reduced its work week from 68 hours to 52.
However, the government proposed to re-increase the legal amount of overtime to enable a 69-hour work week.
"Rather than forcing you to do it, it's more like a culture that makes you feel you have no choice but overwork," Yeon Jeong said.
To make matters worse, a 2021 survey showed South Korean women earning 31.1% less than men, making the country's gender wage gap rate the highest among OCED nations.
Backlash from the "MZ Generation"
While the government's intention was to create flexibility among workers by increasing the number of overtime hours and compensating it with longer holiday leaves, the South Korean MZ Generation, which consists of Millenials and Gen Z in the workforce, immediately opposed the idea.
Women's groups further argued a 69-hour workweek would only entrench already stereotypical gender roles in Korean society, in which men get stuck at work for longer and women are forced to stay at home.
Sae Hee emphasized that, in a family set-up, the wife was the one who had to give up her work to look after their children.
In response to the backlash on longer work hours, the South Korean government reversed its initial proposal and said it would take a new "direction" after listening to the concerns of the MZ Generation.
It also increased maternity leave for new mothers from 12 months to 18 months to boost birth rates.
