The Korean government recently released a series of legislative reforms, of which a few have caught the public’s eye. One of these was the new reform on surnames, following the abolition of the patriarchal headship system, which based the legal acceptance of family members around the father’s surname and children who shared it. Along with the change, the government took an extra step in assuring that now all children will have their surnames decided through negotiation between the father and the mother.

A glaringly obvious point that the government missed, however, is that giving children their mother’s surname is not effective in terms of helping achieve gender equality, which seems to be the reform’s purpose. The mother’s surname is inevitably her father’s surname, meaning that the surname reform essentially changed the situation to children merely having a choice between their paternal and maternal grandfather’s surname.

At this point one wonders if this new policy is little more than a show of supposed “wokeness,” instead of an actual effort to move Korea towards gender equality. Unfortunately, the recent direction of the government seems to indicate the former.

Various phenomena in Korean society demonstrate that men feel more than enraged by the government’s constant efforts to deride them while simultaneously stealing 18 months of their precious 20s with mandatory military service. At the same time, women feel severely troubled in that they receive overbalanced affirmative action while still not having their biggest complaints — such as the stark workplace attitude towards pregnancy — addressed at all. The same government that removed the traces of compensation that men had, such as receiving a five percent score increase on government official exams in exchange for their mandatory service, opted to give all women a three-point advantage when applying for aid from the Korea SMEs and Startups Agency (KOSME), six times the 0.5 points that currently serving members of the army and disabled candidates receive.

The overwhelmingly negative opinion of the ruling party was proved as recently as the 2021 Seoul mayoral by-election, where over 70 per cent of the male population between 20 and 30 voted for the opposition, while female support for the ruling party also withered, barely outrunning the opposition by four percent.

All hope is not lost on the political front though, in that some of the government’s policies seem somewhat reasonable. Announced on the same date as the surname reform was the familial structure reform, which redefined the term “family” to also include unwed cohabiting couples. While this may seem like a mere formality at first glance, it entails several important society-wide changes.

First off, it implies that the government is now willing to legally accept non-traditional familial structures. Unmarried couples and single mothers with children are now eligible to receive the benefits that were previously allocated only to married couples and their children. On top of that, this reform indicates a movement towards a more open social attitude towards sexual minorities, who are still technically locked out of legal marriages in Korea.

This, in contrast with the rather meaningless surname reform, is what the government should be doing. It is painfully obvious that the current government has constantly strategized to engineer gender conflict through their policies as a means to attract female voters. Nonetheless, what they have managed to accomplish, in fact, is the disenfranchisement of both men and women. Perhaps it is time that the government move away from their shallow charade and instead move forward with instituting only meaningful policies.