Posts mislead on proportion of South Korean men who marry foreigners

"One in six marriages involving South Korean men in their 20s and 30s were international marriages," reads the Korean-language post uploaded here on Tcafe2a, a South Korean forum, on December 5, 2022.

It also contains other claims about marriages between South Korean men and foreigners, including that the percentage of men in their 20s who married a foreign woman increased from 8.9 percent in 2019 to 14.5 percent in 2021.

For men in their 30s, this rose from 13.6 percent in 2019 to 17.9 percent in 2021, it wrongly claims.

The post makes another misleading claim that "38.7 percent of international marriages (in South Korea) involved South Korean men in their 20s and 30s -- a record high".

The post concludes by claiming the proportion of South Korean men in their 20s and 30s who marry foreigners has increased and it is because of "South Korean women's growing rejection of marriage".

It contains a screenshot of what appears to be a news report, as shown below:

Image

Screenshot of the misleading post, taken on December 24, 2022

Similar claims were shared here, here and here in other South Korean online forums, as well as here on Facebook.

However, these posts are misleading.

Misrepresented numbers

A keyword search on Google found the screenshot shows paragraphs from a news report published by the South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo on November 3, 2022.

The report was headlined: "Increase in the number of men in their 20s and 30s who married foreign women" and cited a report released in 2021 by the South Korean government's official statistics agency, Statistics Korea.

However, the Chosun Ilbo report did not state "one in six South Korean men in their 20s and 30s" who married in 2021 tied the knot with foreign women, as claimed in the misleading posts.

A Statistics Korea spokesperson told AFP only 3.2 percent of marriages in 2021 were between a South Korean man in his 20s or 30s and a foreign or naturalised woman -- "obviously well below one in six (about 17 percent)".

The post also misrepresented the percentage increase of South Korean men in their 20s or 30s who married a foreign woman between 2019 and 2021.

The misleading posts used a figure from the Statistics Korea report that only relates to South Korean men aged between 25 and 34, and ignores those in their early 20s or late 30s.

In addition, the Statistics Korea report actually stated that 52.2 percent of all international marriages in 2021 involved South Korean men in their 20s and 30s, not 38.7 percent as stated in the misleading posts.

In the report, the "international marriages" category also includes a wedding between two foreigners in South Korea.

'No significant cultural or societal shifts'

Kim Young-soon, director of the multicultural convergence research centre at the Incheon-based Inha University, said that South Korea has not experienced any significant cultural or societal shifts in recent years that would indicate a significant increase in international marriages between younger South Koreans and foreigners.

"While observed trends like a growing opposition to marriage among the younger generation and a shrinking marriage-age population exist, this claim appears to be conflating these trends with misused data to produce misguided conjectures about the prevalence of international marriages," Kim told AFP on December 21, 2022.

Separately, the spokesperson for Statistics Korea told AFP that the agency's report made no assessments about South Korean women's opposition to marriage, adding that it normally did not make qualitative interpretations about its data.