[Jjinbit] The Weight of the First Child

Editor's Note[Jjinbit] is a shortened form of 'Jung Hyunjin's Business Trend' and 'Real Business Trend,' a segment that showcases trends in the changing world of work.

Turning 34 this year, the topic that has come to the forefront in conversations with friends is pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting. This is an unavoidable, once-in-a-lifetime concern for female office workers who have passed the Korean average age of first childbirth, 32.3 years, and are approaching the medical threshold of advanced maternal age at 35. Faced with the constraint of time, women cannot help but consider what they must endure with their first pregnancy and childbirth.

Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, focused on how the birth of the ‘first child’ affects the gender wage gap. Analyzing over 200 years of U.S. labor market data, she found that wages for men and women in the same occupation were equal after college graduation, but a significant gap began to emerge 1 to 2 years after the birth of the first child. Female workers’ salaries dropped, while male workers’ salaries actually increased. This phenomenon has been termed the ‘motherhood penalty’ and the ‘fatherhood premium.’

Professor Goldin identified ‘greedy work’ as the root cause of this gap. Jobs that demand irregular schedules, overnight work, and long hours, but offer high income and guaranteed promotions, reinforce the fatherhood premium.

It is rare to find female workers who fear the birth of their first child because their own salary might decrease while their husband’s or boyfriend’s salary increases. For women who intend to have children, it is far more important whether they can balance dual incomes while managing both childcare and work. The focus is on whether working conditions can be adjusted flexibly to respond to the countless unexpected events that come with parenting. If such balance is difficult, they have no choice but to find new jobs or face career interruptions.

Thus, women in their 30s must cope with major life changes alongside the birth of their first child. In a social perception and economic structure where ‘childcare is the mother’s responsibility,’ they must give up the dreams and careers they have worked hard to achieve. They must also accept the anxiety that it will be difficult to live life on their own terms for at least ten years until their children grow up to some extent.

This anxiety turns into certainty through experiences in companies and society. Although corporate work-family balance policies exist, they are often operated as mere show. Four out of ten Korean workers cannot freely take maternity or parental leave. The rate of male parental leave is 28.9%, far below the over 70% rate for women. Recently, the government expanded the ‘parental joint childcare leave system’ to encourage male parental leave, but a friend of the same age, two months away from her first childbirth, expressed frustration, saying, “If the country doesn’t enforce it, it’s a policy that won’t be used anyway.”

Comedian Jung Sung-ho, a ‘dad of five children,’ recently drew attention on a broadcast by saying, “Childcare is sacrifice,” and “Please create an environment where parents can make sacrifices.” He pointed out that without even having an environment where parents can sacrifice themselves for childcare, how can they possibly raise children? Changing corporate culture, which is far behind the pace of social change, must come first to gradually reveal solutions to the low birthrate problem.