People in These Countries Think Stay-at-Home Dads Are Not Manly Enough

It’s 2019 and, apparently, you’re a deadbeat if you're a guy who stays home to take care of your children. At least that’s what many in South Korea and other countries think, when asked to weigh-in on full-time dads.

Early this year, Ipsos released a study on global attitudes towards gender equality, collecting data from 27 countries. One of the statements respondents were asked to agree or disagree with was: “A man who stays home to look after his children is less of a man.”

Lord knows what constitutes being “a man” in the first place, but according to the countries who ranked high in the survey, it definitely isn’t staying at home. Aside from South Korea, other countries that came up on top were India and Brazil.

While South Korea is quite developed in other areas (It’s the 12th largest economy in the world by GDP and has the 11th highest life expectancy), they fair low when it comes to parity between men and women.

According to the 2018 Global Gender Gap Report conducted by the World Economic Forum, South Korean women fair low in almost every category when compared to their male counterparts, with the only exception being life expectancy. South Korea ranked 121 out of 149 countries because of the large gap between the estimated earned income of men and women. It also ranked 133, when it came to the number of women working in legislative, managerial, and senior positions. According to the World Bank, women only make up 17 percent of the parliament in the country.

Such old school notions of a stereotypical family unit with the doting housewife and a bread-winning husband are signifiers of a society with deep patriarchal roots. Until the fall of the Joseon dynasty in 1910, many social, economic, and political structures were put in place to transform Korea into a male-dominated Neo-Confucian society.

The Korean government is now trying to change this, even putting measures in place to level the playing field and bring an end to what President Moon Jae-in described as a “shameful reality.”

Moon, who once described himself as a “feminist president,” has promised to make society more inclusive for women, by pouring more resources into enhancing the role of the Ministry of Gender Equality, bridging the chasm of wage inequality, and increasing the representation of women in ministerial positions. These historic moves have served to chisel at a once bulletproof glass ceiling.

India is the next country on the Ipsos list, with an agreement rating of 39 percent. India has long been known to have patriarchal institutions. Belief systems like patrilineality and patrilocality have cultivated mindsets that have lead to families preferring sons over daughters. This has also led to practices that have plagued women like dowry-related violence, honour killings, and sexual violence. The country also experiences increasingly masculine sex ratios.

Like South Korea, the Indian government has resolved to take affirmative action and address the issue of gender-based violence and inequality. The passing of stricter sexual assault laws and the introduction of international human rights instruments are some of the efforts put in place to reach gender equality.

According to the Gender Gap Report, however, it would still take 108 years to reach parity on a global scale. The idea of waiting that long to dismantle sexism and gender-based discrimination at an institutional level is a harrowing thought.