South Korea's Birth Sex-Ratio Imbalance from the 1980s to the Early 1990s

South Korea's Birth Sex-Ratio Imbalance from the 1980s to the Early 1990s refers to a period when far more boys than girls were born, with the imbalance most pronounced among third and subsequent children. In the novel, statistics establish the scale of son preference, while Oh Misook's experience makes its cost personal: the pressure to prevent the birth of a daughter falls on her alone. The period also frames later scenes of gendered schooling, hiring, and family care, showing that demographic preference belongs to a wider social order rather than an isolated set of reproductive decisions.

Historical setting and scale

The imbalance persisted into the 1990s. In 1982, the year Kim Jiyoung was born, 106.8 boys were born for every 100 girls, within the cited natural range of 103 to 107. The ratio then rose, reaching 116.5 boys per 100 girls in 1990. At the height of the imbalance in the early 1990s, the ratio for third and later children exceeded two boys for every girl.

The novel places these figures beside the government’s population-control program, known as family planning. The policy context and son preference operated together: although abortion for medical reasons had been legal for a decade, checking a fetus’s sex and terminating female pregnancies had become common. A daughter was treated as though her sex were itself a medical problem. The demographic imbalance thus registers not simply as an unusual statistic but as the cumulative result of decisions made within unequal family expectations.

Oh Misook and the family cost

Oh Misook went to a clinic alone and ended the pregnancy of Jiyoung’s younger sister. The narrative emphasizes the isolation surrounding that decision: responsibility rested on Oh Misook, and no family member was there to comfort her through the physical and emotional ordeal. A doctor held her hand and acknowledged her loss; that brief act of care helped her endure the experience. Years passed before she became pregnant again, and the boy born from that later pregnancy became the brother five years younger than Kim Jiyoung.

This family history gives the national figures a specific human consequence. The imbalance is not presented as a choice made freely by one woman, nor as a burden shared evenly within a household. Rather, son preference creates pressure around which Oh Misook has little support, while the grief and responsibility remain hers. The later birth of a son does not undo the earlier loss; it shows how reproductive decisions and family expectations recur across the same family’s history.

Demographic change in everyday institutions

The book also links the disproportionate number of boys to changes in schooling. When Kim Jiyoung entered middle school, the local school became coeducational; other schools in the area followed within a few years. There were already too many boys for the available school places, and coeducational schools had about twice as many boys’ classes as girls’ classes. The change therefore appears as an institutional response to an expanding male student population, not as evidence that gendered treatment had disappeared.

Indeed, the school’s rules remained especially strict for girls. Their skirts had to cover their knees and conceal the shape of their bodies; the required clothing also prescribed what they could wear beneath thin summer blouses and on their feet in different seasons. Kim Jiyoung’s school was small and run-down, with a sprint track drawn diagonally across its cramped field, but its dress code made regulation of girls’ bodies conspicuous in ordinary school life. The contrast places demographic change beside persistent gender discipline: the number of girls in the school system was smaller, yet girls’ appearance continued to receive close institutional attention.

Later echoes in work and family life

The novel follows the longer reach of gender expectations beyond the period of the skewed birth figures. When Kim Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun discuss having a child, she weighs pregnancy and childcare against her health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future. Jung Daehyun offers to help with care, but the couple’s later planning makes the unequal consequences clearer: they compare returning to work immediately, returning after a year of leave, and not returning at all. Caring for the child would require sending her to Jung Daehyun’s elderly parents in Busan or hiring a live-in nanny, neither of which feels workable. They conclude that Kim Jiyoung will stay home, with his more stable and better-paid job and prevailing expectations about husbands’ and wives’ roles shaping the decision.

Workplace evidence provides a related, later measure of gender inequality, without suggesting that the birth imbalance alone caused it. In 2005, women made up 29.6 percent of new employees at 100 companies, a result described as a major improvement; in a separate survey, 44 percent of recruiting managers at large corporations preferred male candidates with equivalent qualifications. Unofficial recommendations from university departments could also favor male students. One high-achieving woman eventually entered a company through open recruitment, but left after realizing that women did not advance beyond a certain pay grade and that no one around her could say how long maternity leave lasted. Such episodes extend the novel’s account from preference at birth to unequal access to work and advancement.

The pressures continue after childbirth in Kim Jiyoung’s domestic life. When Jung Jiwon begins daycare shortly after turning one, the arrangement gives Kim Jiyoung roughly three hours alone, most of which she spends on laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food. At the same time, the family faces a 60-million-won increase in its rental deposit and takes on another loan; the rising costs of housing, living, and education intensify the pressure for Kim Jiyoung to earn income. Yet the novel describes mothers who leave work as often returning to lower-paid or more menial jobs, while more than half remain unable to find new work for over five years. These later circumstances do not erase the historical specificity of the sex-ratio imbalance. They show how the novel sets that history within a continuing pattern in which the value attached to sons and the unequal allocation of care shape women’s choices across generations and institutions.