More and more Korean women are giving up their jobs to take care of their children and, according to statistics, their number, which has steadily if slightly increased in recent years, surged in 2014. Korea Statistics experts put in relation to the increase with the baby boom of 2007, entitled, according to the Chinese calendar, to the golden pig, and considered a year that ensures exceptional prosperity and good luck to those born there. Koreans, like the Chinese, believe in it blindly and rushed to have their children born in that lucky year. Seven years later, the time has come for all these children to go to school (in Korea, elementary school starts at the age of seven) and the mothers - the "weakest" person in the family from a working point of view - have left their jobs en masse to support children in the first years of school. The news is better understood if one takes into account that Korean schools - among the best in the world in terms of results and performance - demand a great deal from their students and from the very first years.
The competition for access to the best universities - those that ensure the most prestigious and best paid jobs - is very high and starts very early: the student, who passes the elementary classes with high grades, in fact, can afford to enroll in the best school among those top, and so on. Bearing the brunt of this rat race for offspring are mothers, who sacrifice jobs and aspirations both because they generally earn less than their husbands, and because it is widely believed that it is up to them to take care of their children's needs. Furthermore, Korean men are particularly reluctant to work within the home. Another statistic from the OECD says that Korean husbands and fathers spend no more than 45 minutes a day on housework and childcare, less than a third of the average for OECD countries (141 minutes). The same statistic that presents Korean men in a bad light, instead rewards the Danes, who, with 186 minutes a day spent working at home alongside their women, are the most "virtuous" husbands on the planet.
