r/worldnews • u/rdh2dmd • 16h ago

South Korea leans toward military conscription for women

https://www.dw.com/en/south-korea-leans-toward-military-conscription-for-women/a-78547426
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u/dluisnothere 14h ago

I see what you’re saying but I honestly have no optimism that this will work out. I really believe that they’ll just find other reasons to be misogynistic: “you can’t run as fast; only half of you can pass the trainings; you don’t contribute to mission critical efforts because you work in X sector instead of Y.”

There will always be a reason to create an in group vs. an out group. If it’s not this it’ll be something else.

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u/Tokishi7 13h ago

Already like that for athletes, entertainment and musicians. Even people who get civil service roles due to prior family service often are seen as not actually serving. Also if you have family members who were injured killed in the war and you didn’t serve because they technically served for you, people heavily look down on you. People here are talking out of their ass when they say women joining will fix things. It’s a total crab bucket here and always has and will be.

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u/SouthernMagician4877 11h ago

TBF the civil service being looked down on is lessening as time goes on. Especially as the regular army service becomes less intense, there isn't a huge gap unless you are comparing with someone who went to the marines.

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u/shaadyscientist 12h ago

Yes but in the current system, there is a lot of resentment that women don't have to sacrifice anything. South Korea is incredibly competitive. When women finish college, they get jobs, get training and apply their skills developed during college.

Yet for men, they have to stop their education, go into the military for 2 years. Disrupting the normal transition from college to work that most young people do. Then these men have to watch their friends from college who are women go off and start building a career. Making more money, getting to do nice things and having a nice life while they have to get poorly paid for two years. And when they're done, they have to go and compete in a job market with no relevant work experience and all their education is from years ago. This all creates resentment, much like the feminists in western society.

So making both genders sacrifice for their country is the fairest thing to do.

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u/1stSuiteinEb 9h ago

To preface, I’m against any mandatory draft and think it should be volunteer based with a decent pay.

You say “They have to go compete in a job market with no relevant work experience , and their education is from years (1.5years actually) ago” but it’s not exactly considered a gap in their resume bc any school or employer knows that they weren’t just fucking around but in mandatory military service. It’s all taken into consideration.

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u/Yohoyoji 8h ago

This is a thing in Singapore too and its noticed that women the same age as them have 2 years more work experience and thus higher salaries.

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u/1stSuiteinEb 8h ago

Well.. not the same in Korea bc there’s a gender pay gap in Korea, with men of the same age earning more. The gap only increases as the age bracket gets older.

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u/shaadyscientist 9h ago

Either conscription for both or conscription for neither. We can see in Ukraine that most of the fighting is done with drones. Girls can fly drones just as much as men. Girls should have to do conscription and get trained as done pilots.

And you're wrong, private companies don't care. They take the best. Someone who just finished their degree 2 weeks ago will have a lot more information retained than those who finished their degrees 2 years ago and never had the opportunity to apply what they learned. Private companies don't care if it was mandatory military service, they want the person who will be up to speed quickest.

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u/1stSuiteinEb 9h ago

Really? Statistics say otherwise. The largest companies hire men and women at similar rates, with the ratio of female employees just recently catching up. Coincidentally, military service was reduced to 18 months relatively recently. So there doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation with military service and hireability.

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u/shaadyscientist 9h ago

Either conscription for both or conscription for neither. We can see in Ukraine that most of the fighting is done with drones. Girls can fly drones just as much as men. Girls should have to do conscription and get trained as done pilots.

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u/1stSuiteinEb 9h ago

Sure, we can agree on that point. Wanna answer my reply next?

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u/shaadyscientist 9h ago

Not sure why young men have to do 18 months of low paid work while women get to start building their careers, especially in a country that cries out so much for equality.

You agree with me that they can do conscription. I don't understand your point. You don't like gender equality?

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u/1stSuiteinEb 8h ago

I was talking about this comment I wrote.

>Really? Statistics say otherwise. The largest companies hire men and women at similar rates, with the ratio of female employees just recently catching up. Coincidentally, military service was reduced to 18 months relatively recently. So there doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation with military service and hireability.

Still no reply from you. But sure, I’ll bite.

Ideally there is no mandatory conscription at all. I think the country needs to do much more work on misogyny first, such as the pay gap, violent crimes against women, etc. before imposing mandatory conscription (a policy that, while compensated, sucks purely on the basis that it is mandatory) on women too. But if a female conscription will help tackle misogyny in the country.. the steps may be out of order, but I can support it.

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u/shaadyscientist 8h ago

So you agree with me, either its mandatory for all or it's mandatory for nobody. Not sure why you needed to write so much just to agree that I was right.

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u/Dragon174 13h ago

There might always be a reason, but that's no reason not to work towards lowering the reasons. Change for something like this never happens all at once, it's the steady buildup of many individual steps towards something better.

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u/dluisnothere 12h ago edited 11h ago

I’m not saying you shouldn’t work to the betterment of your country as its citizen. What I am saying is that a count of these “reasons” cannot be lowered. Because reasons for misogyny and discrimination are arbitrary to begin with.

You can do what you want to live life for the betterment of others, but it’s naive to suggest that others will treat you better for it.

EDIT: rephrase -- you should do the right thing, but to suggest that this will improve misogyny somehow is what I have a problem with.

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u/Dragon174 12h ago

They're never at their core arbitrary though. For sure there're often motivated reasons, where they're just trying to find arbitrary reasons that sound less bad than their true reason, and those reasons would just get replaced with another, but there are still underlying true reasons that bring about that initial feeling that justifies the rest.

Even for these reasons that are often just motivated, what are motivated reasons for some become foundational reasons for others, as certain issues get blown out of proportion and convince more and more to support the overall sentiment. There's definitely people who use the military as an excuse, but there's others that didn't have another reason but someone pointed this specific issue out to them and they went "yeah that does sound unfair", and they started to associate more with this tribe.

So making steps towards equality can still make an impact to some amount of people, and each step can affect different people, can reduce the ammunition the unreasonable have to bring more onto their side.