Work-family and work-life issues

Housework allocation from a gender perspective has been the focus of extensive research over the past decades, as the gender division of household labour is a crucial component of the continued existence of gender stratification. Couples often experience conflicts in relation to household work. In Sweden this has been explained by the fact that gender equality, both at home and at work, is strongly normative, but not always matched by an equally egalitarian situation in the family. Perceived fairness of housework sharing can therefore differ from the ‘objective’ share of total housework hours. If the sharing of housework is perceived as unfair, the level of conflict about home tasks is also likely to increase. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between housework sharing (egalitarian/non-egalitarian), perceived fairness of the division and frequency of conflicts about home tasks. Our research approach is explanatory and we will develop a typology using latent class analysis. The analysis will be based on data from the 2009 round of the YAPS survey of 1054 Swedish young people living with a partner.

It is often argued that the parental leave should be extended in order to help employees achieve the balance of work and family life. However, one should be careful in designing the parental leave since there is a tradeoff between the continuity of employment after childbearing and the depreciation of human capital due to the time off the work. The paper investigates whether the parental leave payment introduced in Korea in 2001 and expanded over the subsequent decade helped women's take-up of the leave and employment after giving birth. The results are as follows. First, the increase in the payment indeed raised the female take-up of the leave. Second, women returned to labor market less often after giving birth in the short run, but the size of the effect tends to diminish in the long run. However, the negative effect on returning to the same workplace after the birth remains significant in the long run. Lastly, the share of women of childbearing age at workplace increased in large-sized firms due to the increase in the parental leave payment, whereas it decreased in small and medium-sized firms. These findings suggest that the government should engineer the parental leave scheme so that female workers have an incentive to return to work earlier and that small and medium-sized firms have an incentive to adopt the policy.

This article contributes to the literature on work-family conflicts by examining the role of self-employment in marital stability. The aggregate trends show that the rise in divorce rate was particularly sharp in the 1960s and 1970s and then the divorce rate has stalled or declined slightly, while the trend in self-employment followed the opposite pattern: the proportion of the labor force self-employed ceased its downward trend in the 1970s and has been rising ever since. It is hypothesized that self-employment might reduce the work-family conflict through several pathways: First, the self-employed work for themselves and so can regulate and adjust their workload. Second, self-employment gives an opportunity of flexible work schedule, and thus can increase marital interaction time. Finally, owning and running a joint business can have a “binding” effect in the sense that spouses who jointly own and run a business share both emotional and financial ties. On the other hand, self-employment can actually increase the work-family conflict by mixing the domains of work with the household. The first and second hypotheses are tested using the National Survey of Families and Households, and data for the third hypothesis comes from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics-2.

While previous research has focused on the gender division of housework, this article extends the notion of unpaid work done in households to care work. Using the National Survey of Families and Households and the American Time Use Survey, the author explores the gendered nature of both child care and care after the elderly. Literature on gender division of household work is used to as a point of departure in the analysis. In particular, the exchange-bargaining and gender performance are evaluated using relative earnings as a measure of gender deviance. As care work differs from household work because it often involves the emotional component, the possibility that care work is not as gendered as housework is also tested. Implications for gender inequality are discussed.

This paper's purpose is to test whether the less wages wives earn than their husbands, the more chores they do or not from dual income families in South Korea. There are two major hypotheses: One is a comparative advantages hypothesis and another is a gender display hypothesis(Brines, 1994). The latter occurs in a patriarchal society and a Confucianism tradition remains important as a social ethic in South Korea.
Brines(1994) addressed that a gender display hypothesis could be sustained, when males’ squared economic dependency coefficient is negative and females’ squared economic dependency coefficient is positive. However, according to the Korean Time Use Survey 2009, the majority of husbands do not housework. This makes previous researches do not prove a gender display hypothesis perfectly.
The author analyzed data after separating families by husbands’ housework time and tentatively conclude that 1) a squared economic dependency affects on housework time 2) females’ coefficient is positive and males’ coefficient is negative and 3) wives whose husbands do housework spend more time doing housework than wives whose husbands do not participate in housework. This means that males’ doing housing work cannot reduce females’ housework time. Rather, males’ participating in housework covers up a fact that males exploit females.

The present research studies the causal relationship between females’ transitions into marriage on the one hand and transitions into nonparticipation on the other hand. Relying on Egyptian and Jordanian panel microdata, we estimate a competing risk model to understand how can work delay marriage and how marriage affects the decision of working and the type of work to engage in. We use an instrumental variables approach to identify the causal relationship. The results of this study are expected to be of great importance to show which policies should be made available to improve women’s economic conditions in the labor market and to make sure that the private sector can be as attractive for female workers as the public sector. Ideally, we might suggest that – with time – a more equal sharing of caring responsibilities among men and women benefits female labor force participation, the economy and society as a whole.

The Korean society has struggled with the title ‘the lowest fertility rate among OECD countries’. This paper looks through two national plans on the low fertility in Korea, focusing on the family policies. Childcare has been a popular family policy with the increases of budget and enrollment. This paper examines the history of childcare laws and the increase of the government subsidy on childcare. It discusses some controversies and arguments on childcare policy, such as childcare service hours, stakeholders, and free childcare service for all children. For better child and family well-being, it suggests a widening of range for child allowance and parental leave for both mothers and fathers at private sectors as well as upgrading childcare quality. It proposes possible policy options for childcare subsidy and child allowance by children’s age, parents’ working condition and family income level. It argues that Korea’s public spending on family, especially cash benefits, is the lowest among OECD countries. The budget for child allowance and parental leave should come from public revenue, because the investment for human capital of well-educated women and young children is in the range of social responsibility and government matters, as shown in the national plan on low fertility.