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At dinner with some State Department and embassy staff a few years back in Seoul, one of the State Department folks confidently asserted that three-quarters of the refugees leaving North Korea were women. “How could you know?” I asked. The diplomat frowned and pointed to the statistics on refugees entering South Korea. But the number entering South Korea and the number leaving North Korea are not logically equivalent I observed. This political appointee looked at me blankly.
I was reminded of this exchange when scanning the South Korean government report on North Korea’s population which generated an earlier post on famine deaths. It contained the chart above, which shows that after peaking at roughly three-quarters of the arrivals entering South Korea, the female share has declined to slightly fewer than half in 2010—or about the same percentage as the female share of the general population.
Some research that Steph Haggard and I have done seems to confirm my expectation that the migration patterns of men and women differ significantly. We found that men and women, especially unmarried women, exhibit different patterns with respect to duration in transit between North and South Korea. For men, the median length of time in third countries before arriving in South Korea is two years. For unmarried women it is five years. One can only speculate as to the reasons. Unmarried people may have been less risk averse in terms of the migration decision and better able to adapt once in China. This could contribute to a phenomenon that emerges from some interviews. Some young women made the decision to migrate to China, but once settled in China and exposed to more information, made a second decision to on-migrate to South Korea.
It is fair to say that there is much that we (or at least I) do not understand about the migration experiences of North Korean refugees. I suppose that is why as an analyst, I found the State Department official’s confidence both unjustified and disconcerting.
