Survey shows that Seoul gets under your skin

More and more people are in a Seoul state of mind, a survey showed.

After celebrating the Day of the Seoul Citizen on Friday, the city government Sunday released the results of a door-to-door poll of 46,000 capital residents older than 15.

According to the survey, 78 percent said they feel that Seoul is their hometown - despite the fact that many actually come from other parts of the country. In 2006, only 65 percent of people surveyed said the same thing.

“People in Seoul are coming to feel that the place they’re in now, making a living, is their actual hometown, rather than where they were really born,” Jeong Yeong-mi, a Seoul Metropolitan Government official, said in a telephone interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily yesterday.

Seven out of 10 respondents who came from other cities answered that they “feel Seoul is their hometown as they spent many years in Seoul.”

The rate of native Seoulites steadily increased from 25.1 percent in 1980 to 31.1 percent in 1990 and 40.3 percent in 2010, but it was still less than half, the survey analyzed.

Among native Seoulites, 12 percent said they do not feel Seoul is their hometown even though they were born in the city. The survey didn’t say why.

The survey also showed an increasing number of working women in the city. Among citizens older than 12, 43.5 percent of women in Seoul are commuting to the workplace every day, which jumped from 16.5 percentile in 1980.

Approximately 1.92 million women are commuters in Seoul, according to the survey.

The number of highly educated women in Seoul also rose 8.5 times over the past three decades, from 180,151 in 1980 to 1.52 million in 2010. For the same period, the number of highly educated men grew only 3.8 times, from 472,434 to 1.8 million.

The percentage of the population aged zero to 14 fell sharply from 31.2 percent in 1980 to 14.1 percent. Meanwhile, the elderly population expanded from 2.5 percent in 1980 to 7.1 percent.

By Kim Hee-jin [heejin@joongang.co.kr]