The Korean women want careers, and if they're open to having children, they want husbands who are willing to split the housework and childrearing fifty-fifty. Going by the article, the complaint is that it's hard to find potential husbands open to that arrangement. Also, going by the testimony of one woman quoted in the article, apparently some of them, when they do find a husband agreeable to splitting the housework—in this particularly case, the dish washing—find that the husband doesn't do the housework to their satisfaction.
I don't have a solution for these women, but I notice that the BBC spent a year interviewing Korean women, but no Korean men.
I think a solution for the Korean men who maybe want children and wives who neither want careers of their own nor who insist that the domestic duties be split evenly would be something equivalent to the United States's H1-B Visa: namely, aspiring Korean husbands should be able to sponsor and marry foreign wives when no suitable native born candidates can be found.
I wonder how does North Korea is faring when compared to its southern rival. Are they experiencing problems on this front too?
> "Sometimes at the weekends I go and get an IV drip, just to get enough energy to go back to work on Monday," she adds casually, as if this were a fairly normal weekend activity.
Wonder what that IV is full of?
High population density, like many of the other low birth rate nations. At some point people don't thrive living so close and crowded together. The carrying capacity of civilization has its limits.
Probably because that is prohibitively expensive for them in terms of money and time. This more or less translates to many modern countries. The only way to solve this problem probably is to provide everyone with great free child care services covering 90%+ of the hassle.
This is a problem in many developed nations, the general reasoning boils down to
1. Cost of living and child care
2. Work, stress and lack of free time
3. Little to no support from society and community.
The reason this is affecting Korea, Japan and China so much is that there aren't many immigrants to offset the lack of new children being born.
There is a lot of wealth being generated but most of it goes to people who are already wealthy, so most people don't have the "luxury" of enough disposable income, free time, and support to have children.
This is not women's fault, its society's failing