When Park He Ran was a young mother, other women would approach her to ask what her secret was. Park had had three boys in a row, in an era when every South Korean mother considered it her paramount duty to bear a son. Park gets a different reaction today.

“When I tell people I have three sons and no daughter, they say they are sorry for my misfortune,” said Park, 61, a newspaper executive.

In South Korea, once one of Asia’s most rigidly patriarchal societies, a centuries-old preference for baby boys over baby girls is fast receding. Demographers have welcomed the shift, which they say holds promise for other Asian countries, like China, India and Vietnam.

“China and India are closely studying South Korea as a trendsetter in Asia,” said Chung Woo Jin, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. “They are curious whether the same social and economic changes can occur in their countries as fast as they did in South Korea’s relatively small and densely populated society.”

Not long ago, South Korea was where these countries are now. In the early 1990s its sex imbalance was as high as 116.5 boys for every 100 girls. In those years, South Korea urged its people to have only two children.

The results can be seen today in some rural South Korean towns, where four of every 10 men marry women from poorer Asian countries, like Vietnam — a trend expected to deepen as those born in the 1990s reach marriageable age.

The rural bride shortage was exacerbated by the country’s rapid economic growth, which improved women’s educational and employment opportunities and led young women to migrate to cities.

Still, bachelors in rural South Korea are better off than the poorest men in poorer Asian countries, who may have no choice but to stay single, experts said.

“In the old days, when there was no adequate social safety net, Korean parents regarded having a son as kind of making an investment for old age security,” Chung said.

In those times, it was common for married Korean men to feel ashamed if they had no sons. Some went so far as to divorce wives who did not bear boys.

But fewer Korean sons live with their parents or support them today. And with women’s income on the rise, more of those who do need their children’s support can rely on daughters. Meanwhile, feminists won a major victory when Parliament abolished one of the last bastions of male chauvinism in the country: the centuries-old civil code, which, among other things, barred a woman from registering her children under her own name or under her new husband’s name after a divorce, even if she were raising them.

With women’s economic influence rising and the old male-oriented Confucian precepts crumbling, parents now find fewer reasons to prefer sons over daughters.

As Park He Ran’s experience shows, they even pity people who have no daughters, experts said.

The New York Times