KDI School Professor Links Korean Men’s Gender Grievance To Marriage Market Pressures

A new study by Professor Joeun Kim of the KDI School of Public Policy and Management has challenged the dominant explanation that antifeminist attitudes among young men are driven mainly by job insecurity, economic decline or perceived loss of male status.

Professor Kim presented the paper at the Gender and Politics in East Asia Conference held at Yonsei University, Seoul, where she argued that hostility toward feminism in South Korea may be better understood through the changing politics of marriage, partnership, and gender norms. The paper, titled ‘Status Threat, Antifeminist Attitudes and Far-Right Support in South Korea’, draws on an online survey experiment of 2,286 Korean men aged 19 to 49, taken from a wider sample of 4,500 respondents. 

The study compared how men responded to three different vignettes: a neutral control about sleep health, a job-threat condition about declining male employment, and a marriage-threat condition about rising male singlehood. According to the findings, employment threat slightly lowered men’s perception of their collective status, but did not produce clear hostility toward feminists or sexual minorities. Marriage threat, however, increased hostility toward feminists and sexual minorities without necessarily reducing men’s perceived social status.

This, Professor Kim argued, shows that antifeminist grievance should not be read simply as a reaction to men feeling economically displaced. Instead, the evidence points to what she calls a “patriarchal enforcement” mechanism, where grievance is directed at groups seen as challenging traditional marriage, family and gender roles.

In her presentation, Professor Kim said the results complicate the usual story of male backlash. The study found that Korean men in the sample rated women’s status higher than men’s, but their negative attitudes were not evenly spread across all women. Descriptive statistics showed moderate warmth toward women and men in general, high warmth toward mothers of multiple children, and strikingly low warmth toward feminists and sexual minorities.

The study also found that the effect was stronger among men who already held traditional views of women’s domestic roles, especially those who agreed that preschool children suffer when mothers work. Among such respondents, exposure to marriage threat sharply reduced warmth toward feminists and sexual minorities, suggesting that antifeminist hostility is intensified when demographic anxieties are filtered through traditional gender beliefs.

Professor Kim said that South Korea’s gender politics cannot be fully explained by labour market pressures alone. As marriage and partnership rates decline, gender grievance may continue even in a society where women’s gains in education and employment have become more visible. The study, therefore, calls for a broader institutional conversation on gender, family formation, demographic change and political polarisation.

The paper cautions, however, that the findings are based on Korean men aged 19 to 49 and that further research is needed to know whether the same pattern holds in other countries with different family systems, marriage markets and political conditions. Still, it concludes that understanding the logic of gender grievance is essential to explaining why antifeminist politics persists and why its targets are often selective rather than general.

Other presentations at the conference widened the discussion beyond antifeminist backlash in South Korea. In ‘Legislating with Women: How Gender Composition Affects Issue Advocacy’, Leonardo R. Arriola, Donghyun Danny Choi, Joonwoo Suh and Soosun You examined whether women’s presence in legislative committees leads to greater attention to women’s concerns in policymaking. Using South Korea’s National Assembly as the case, the paper focused on how daily interactions among lawmakers can shape policy priorities through social learning, norm diffusion and role model effects. 

The authors used a large body of evidence, including 1.8 million speeches from 2000 to 2024 and 5,000 campaign manifestos from 2008 to 2024. Their key finding was that legislators, both men and women, became more vocal on women-related issues after serving alongside more women in committees. The study argued that women’s descriptive representation can translate into substantive representation through ordinary institutional contact, even without binding gender quotas.

A paper by Matthew K. Ribar, Margit Tavits and Carly Wayne, titled ‘When War Hits Home: Conflict Exposure and Domestic Violence in Ukraine’, brought the conference into the politics of war and family life. The paper asked whether exposure to armed conflict strengthens family solidarity or increases abuse at home, using a three-wave panel survey conducted during the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The study tracked 1,058 respondents across three time points in 2025. 

Their findings showed that personal exposure to conflict increased reported domestic violence both across respondents and within the same individuals over time. The paper identified psychological distress as the likely pathway through which wartime violence enters the home, adding that war’s social costs should be understood not only through battlefield casualties and displacement, but also through its effects on household safety and family resilience.

Min Hee Go’s paper, ‘Gendering Exclusion: Gender Norms and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes in Europe and East Asia,’ examined how gender norms shape public attitudes toward immigration. Using World Values Survey data from Europe and three East Asian democracies, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the study argued that gender egalitarianism affects immigration attitudes differently across regions. 

The paper found that gender egalitarianism generally boosts support for immigrant social integration and more lenient immigration policy, with the effect especially strong among men. However, the study also showed that the foundations of immigrant tolerance differ across regions. In East Asia, equal access to education plays a more consistent role, while in Europe several dimensions of gender egalitarianism shape immigration attitudes.

Minseok Jeong and Hannah June Kim’s ‘Divided Before Adulthood: Gender Gaps in Adolescent Attitudes Toward Gender Equality in South Korea’ shifted attention to high school students. The paper asked whether declining support for gender equality among young adults is already visible during adolescence, using two original surveys collected between April and June 2025, one of adolescents and one of adults. 

Their findings showed that men and respondents with more conservative ideologies were less likely to support gender equality across both age groups. The study also found that political knowledge increased support for gender equality, suggesting that political education during formative years could help reduce early attitudinal divisions. The paper’s policy message was that gender polarisation does not simply begin in the labour market or military service, but may start much earlier in social and political development.