::A Geek in Korea::

In the continuing list of “Things I never want to discuss with students again” set of topics, I had a gender preference chapter in our reading book today. These students were around 12 years old, and chapter was talking about how Asian countries favor boys over girls, and how the lopsided birth rate affects social problems.

The very class itself was a reflection of Korea’s bias for boy children over girls to a degree. Overall the girls and boy students are very close, but in this class there are 6 boys to 2 girls. When I asked the boy students if they would prefer to have a brother or a sister, they all answered a brother.

When I asked them if they wanted a boy or girl when they were parents, two said they’d never get married, and the other four said, “I want a boy, because I am a boy.” The two girls responded that they, of course, wanted girls. I think this is probably normal worldwide for any group of children their age.

The current distribution in Korea is for 116 boys, there are 100 girls being born. According to the book, a normal country might end up with a ratio of 105 boys to 100 girls when no bias was found. The book talked about other countries where this became a problem.

The girls in the class didn’t know that some parents abort children based on gender in Korea. They were a little shocked to find out that this ratio was being manipulated by parents trying to have boys, and that there would be social repercusions felt by the children due to this later on when they were adults.

The boys wanted to live in a Korea with no women. They are also utterly homophobic without any sort of contradiction. They just don’t like girls, and they don’t “like” men.The boys called me a “gender traitor” for liking and defending girls in the class, insisting they have equal rights, or even suggesting that an even boy to girl ratio is in the best intrest of a country.

The book talked about the Amazons capturing men for reproduction and killing male babies. The class was surprised that women could be strong and “capture” men. They didn’t like the “male baby murder” the Amazon practiced.

I don’t know why this was in a book for elementary and middle school children. This is why a gender bias question is inherently useless in a class of pre-teen “Eeew, people of the opposite gender are gross” sort of class. However, it did make this The Daily Show clip extra funny.