The male North Korean soldier that defected last month across the DMZ is actually a very small minority of the demographic that composes North Korean defectors. The vast majority of the defectors are actually women:
North Korean women dressed in traditional dresses, leave the restaurant they work at and head to the North Korean embassy in Beijing, on December 17, 2006. Women participate in North Korea’s unofficial economy in at higher rates and the country’s gray markets have continued to proliferate. UPI Photo/Stephen Shaver
The backward North Korean economy produces very little that the world wants. But Big Brother China, however, is hungry for the two things Pyongyang does have in relative abundance: coal and women. The coal keeps the fires burning in energy-poor China. The women help to meet the shortage of brides in China’s male-dominated society.
China’s one-child policy has devastated the female population. Over the past three-and-a-half decades that the policy has been in place, tens of millions of girls have disappeared from the population. They were killed in utero by sex-selection abortions, at birth by female infanticide, or after birth by simple neglect. (……)
One place that Chinese men look for brides is the other side of the Yalu River, for in North Korea there are lots of hungry young women longing for a better life. The population of Kim Jong Un’s socialist paradise subsists in near famine conditions, with two in five North Koreans undernourished and more than two-thirds on food aid. [Fox News]
You can read more at the link, but the 85% number discussed in the article has actually increased from the 80% number in 2015.
Besides the sex industry in China, the other factor that plays into this is that most of the men in North Korea are also tied up working in state owned factories or the military. This leaves the women to often be the ones working in the various markets that have sprang up around North Korea. The women working in the markets develop contacts with businessmen bringing goods in from China. This makes the women thus more susceptible to seeking to cross the border themselves.
Of further interest is that many of the North Korean refugees when they do come to South Korea end up becoming part of the sex industry in that country as well.
