aelle, around the world.

After Japan, it’s now Korea‘s turn to take creative measures to encourage baby making. At 7pm on Wednesdays, the Ministry of Health will turn the lights off in its buildings, thus forcing workers to get out of work already and go spend time with their families – and hopefully make them bigger. Although I’m sure it’d be a lot more effective to cut electricity in apartment buildings as well. What good is it for population renewal to get home and play WoW, really.

I already witnessed similar initiatives when working in Japan: on Wednesdays, working after hours was forbidden in my company – except that none of the executives complied to the rule. Wally can also testify on Japanese crazy work hours: when he sneaked a peak at his boss’s punch card, he found out that he had left the building before midnight only twice in the previous three months – once was on a Sunday afternoon.

At Feministing, Ariel puts this information in parallel with the figures of women’s presence in the workforce and conclude that maternity is already so detrimental to women’s career that the idea that sending the men home early will improve things is necessarily 1- a guy’s idea 2- shortsighted and 3- reeks of privilege. Commenters on the BBC News website concur.

However, I’m not sure that’s the only side of the story. Women’s liberation has progressed a lot slower in Far East Asia than in Europe and America, that’s true. Korea and Japan are going through a nasty baby drought that might end up sinking their economy, that’s also true. But when talking with Asian young adults, I find out that things aren’t as negative as they look from over here. I’d really like to find some data on how things have changed in the past few decades. I get the impression that young adults are also trying to avoid arranged or loveless marriages, women are trying to work on their careers longer, couples are trying to reinvent the rules by which husband and wife relate to each other. It looks like progress to me, and it makes for shaky but interesting times.