A politician causes a scandal by blaming women for the rising number of male suicides in South Korea

She criticized feminism and what she called “reverse discrimination”. Seoul city councilor Kim Ki-dak said in a statement on Friday (June 28) that women are “partly” responsible for the rise in male suicides in South Korea. A politician from the Democratic Party conducted a study of people who tried to end their lives on 21 bridges crossing the Han River between 2018 and 2023.

Out of 4069 suicide attempts, 2487 are men, 1079 are women and 503 are of unknown gender. In 2018, 288 men (67%) attempted suicide from one of these bridges, compared to 798 (77%) in 2023. A rise that Kim Ki-Dak attributes in part to the “dominant” role of women in South Korean society. He thus claimed that men today have a harder time finding a job and a wife in the country.

“Unfounded” and “false” speech

“It is no longer like the past when patriarchy and the ideology of male supremacy prevailed; “Recently, Korea has begun to become a female-centered society, with the number of women outnumbering men by 5 percent by 2023,” he wrote. Before proceeding. “As the number of women increases, various factors come into play, including changes in the marriage market due to a lack of male labor. They find it more and more difficult to find a wife. There are also changes in the roles of men and women related to their participation in society.

And he called on the council of the municipality to “overcome the expansion of this phenomenon of women’s domination”. To do this, Kim Ki-dak argued that “it is necessary to improve awareness of gender equality so that men and women can enjoy equal rights and opportunities.” The politician then announced in South Korean media columns Miner that he wrote this official message based on “his personal opinion” and his own assumptions. Many Koreans, for their part, took to social media to describe his speech as “unreasonable” and “insane.”

Backward equality

Many experts also criticized the reasoning of the councilor of the municipality. “It is dangerous and reckless to make such claims without sufficient evidence,” Song In Han, a professor of mental health at Seoul’s Yonsei University, told the BBC. Other experts have highlighted in the columnsMiner that the suicide rate of men in Korea and the rest of the world has long been higher than that of women. Moreover, South Korean society would be far from being “dominated” by the latter.

According to the BBC, South Korean women hold more part-time jobs than men. Moreover, they would be paid an average of 29% less than their male counterparts. Gender equality in the country has even regressed in recent years, particularly in the area of ​​women’s political emancipation, according to the World Economic Forum’s latest annual gender gap index. In 2022, South Korea ranked 99th^e of the 146 countries analyzed. He was 105th in 2023.