In 2020, a 30-year-old office worker is distressed. He just asked a woman his age out on a date, but she refused him. This was his 101st rebuffed date proposal of the year. Park, although 30, has never had a girlfriend, not even to speak of coming close to finding someone to marry. It has been the same story since elementary school, when he rarely even found a female friend.
According to estimates released by the National Statistical Office (NSO) on May 24, this scenario may become all too common. In a little more than a decade, the office’s report said, 12 out of ever 100 males aged between 25-34 will not be able to find a matching single female in their age group. This is due to disparity in the gender population, which by 2020 will see 3.02 million females in this age demographic versus 3.43 million males, or 88 women per every 100 men. As a result, 407,000 men, or 11.9 percent, will not find an available match of the opposite gender in their age group.
The number of females per 100 males aged 25-34 was 95 in 2000, but the figure will draw toward a downward curve, with 94 in 2010, 91 in 2015 and 88 in 2020, according to the NSO data. This ratio will hit its nadir in 2020 and start to grow, but still will not climb above 90 until 2030. It is highly possible that a problem of so-called "single wild goose males" will be a serious social problem for some time.
Thus, those males who were of elementary school age in the early 2000s will be driven to fierce competition for finding a marriage partner in their age group. When they were born, in the 1990s, the ratio of female to male babies was at a point of heavy imbalance. There were 95 female births per 100 male births in the early 1980s, which dropped further to 89.5 in 1986 and 85.8 by 1990. Fortunately, the ratio between the genders began to recover balance since 2002, and had increased to 92.9 female births per 100 male births in 2005.
Experts attribute this trend to the deep-seated Korean cultural placement of value on having at least one son, which met with a low birthrate during that period as well as the introduction in the mid-1980s of ultrasonic methods to identify the sex of a fetus.
Cho Yeong-tae, a professor of Seoul National University, said, "At that time, amidst a social atmosphere in which people had less children and thus wanted only sons, coupled with the spread of the practice of getting an ultrasound to determine the sex of the fetus, many people aborted females." Added Professor Cho, "As a consequence, in 10 years’ time, men [of marrying age] will not be able to find spouses in their age group, and the birthrate will rapidly drop due to a shortage of women of childbearing age."
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