Being Female and Suicide Ideation
As I was researching risk factors for youth suicide in South Korea, I was intrigued to run into a particular paper that found an interesting association between being female and suicide ideation. Although men have always been more prone to suicide in almost every culture, the suicide rate for women in South Korea has seen a dramatic increase. From 2001 to 2009, in less than a decade, suicides increased by 2.4 times — more than doubled — in females but only by 1.8 times in males. When compared to many other countries, this gender differential in the increase of suicide rate is even more significant. In the United States, for example, the youth suicide rate for males is over four times higher than that for females, while the gender difference in the Korean youth suicide rates in recent years is almost negligible. The paper, Rising Youth Suicide and the Changing Cultural Context in South Korea, marked that this finding may signify additional stress for female Korean youth, putting them at greater danger for self-harm. In an attempt to find what is the source of this additional stress, the authors of the paper pointed to the greater degree of cultural ambivalence created by the rapid societal change in Korea that might be affecting its female youth.
Though it may not be too familiar to those in Western culture, South Korea has seen one of the world’s most rapid economic and social developments. Encountering what is known as the Miracle on the Han River, South Korea transformed from a developing country to a developed country in just 60 years after the Korean War, which left the country entirely devastated. In 2016, South Korea even became the 11th largest economy in the world while its bother North Korea remains at the very bottom of the rank to this day. With such rapid economic growth came equally rapid societal changes that not everyone was capable of keeping up with the pace, and with this an issue arose.
Korea’s older generations are still hugely impacted by Confucian values that essentially support the cultural tradition of gender inequality as they lived in times where “women were segregated from the public domain, deprived of the opportunity to pursue an education, and forced to subordinate themselves to men.” Its modern generations, on the other hand, grew up exposed to the Western cultural idea of gender equality and female empowerment. On university campuses, women have long outnumbered men and are encouraged to compete directly with men in the quest for high status. In employment realms where the older generations are in charge, women still experience a glass ceiling that limits their achievement. The authors infer that these differences in such values are placing the younger generation of females in serious dilemmas, describing that “women who have internalized the Westernized ideals of gender equality, autonomy, equal opportunity, and fair competition for scarce resources are most likely to experience stress as they face invisible barriers that block their achievement opportunities.”
This post is not to pinpoint gender inequality as the one factor behind the high youth suicide rate in Korea. It is instead to 1) postulate the unexceptionally rapid change in Korean society as one of the many factors that make youth suicides in South Korea such a complicated matter and 2) exemplify why mere education programs or simple counseling sessions cannot be the quick fix of the issue.
