Husbands’ Contribution in Housework Remains the Same Even as Wives Earn More and Work More(Kyunghyang)
Husbands’ Contribution in Housework Remains the Same Even as Wives Earn More and Work More
A study found that the hours South Korean men spend doing housework is not significantly influenced by the hours their wives spend at work and the contribution that wives make in household income. The study claims that policies that reduce the working hours of men and that raise the status of women in the labor market are needed to increase the men’s contribution in housework.
According to “Changes and Related Factors in the Unpaid Labor Time of Couples with Preschool Children” (2016), the doctoral dissertation of Kim So-yeong of the Department of Child Development and Family Studies at Seoul National University, who analyzed the 1999-2014 data on living time released by Statistics Korea, even when the wife’s working hours and income increased, there was no significant difference in the husband’s contribution in housework.
Kim analyzed the living time data of 15,096 couples gathered by Statistics Korea on a five-year basis for the past fifteen years, and according to her analysis, the average time spent on housework on a weekday had decreased 32.7 minutes, from 224.9 minutes in 1999 to 192.2 minutes in 2014 for the wives, but during that same period, the husband’s contribution only increased 5.6 minutes from 11.2 minutes to 16.8 minutes. The husband’s increased contribution fails to fill the gap left by the decrease in the time spent on housework by the wife. Working hours spent in the workplace decreased at nearly the same rate for the women and the men, 33.3 minutes and 32.5 minutes respectively, during that same period.
The thesis concluded that the working hours spent in the workplace by the wife hardly had any influence on the time the husband spent on housework. The husband’s working hours at the workplace had relatively stronger influence on his hours spent doing housework than his wife’s working hours at the workplace. The husband tended to spend more time doing housework when his working hours at the workplace were shorter.
Also the wife’s contribution in household income hardly had any relation to the husband’s time spent doing housework. According to Kim, “The wife’s contribution in household income was not a resource providing the wife with an advantage in getting the husband to contribute more to housework. The results put more weight on the assumption that the wife’s income may be used to ‘outsource’ housework.” The outsourcing of housework refers to seeking the help of non-family members and hiring domestic helpers is a typical example.
The dissertation expected wives to spend less time on housework in the future and cited the increase of the influence of the wife’s working hours at the workplace and her income, the reduction of the husband’s working hours at the workplace and the improvement of a corporate culture that tolerates long working hours as future policy challenges. Kim pointed out, “Policy interventions like the reduction of legal working hours in 2004 can contribute to reducing the influence of the husband’s working hours, which is an obstacle in reducing the wife’s time spent doing housework.”
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