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Remarkable achievements in school enrollment and hospital delivery options canceled out by backsliding in employment rates and declining sex ratios

Are women becoming the dominant gender?

Men are spending more of their time on chores. Women are spending less — but it’s still much more than men, reports Washington Post

Parental leave expressly for fathers recommended policy outcome

Marrying a less-educated partner can cost $25,000 per year

Offers alternatives to payments

Sangeetha Madhavan PI, with Kristen Stoebenau, Kenneth Leonard and Michael Wagner

Hofferth and colleagues help make time use data readily accessible

With a rapid economic achievement, education and socio-economic status of Korean women has also considerably improved. 40.0% of total women held bachelor’s degrees in 2015, which was only 1.6% in 1970. College entrance rate of women was estimated at 32.4% in 1990 but increased to 73.5% in 2017, even higher than men (66.3%). As more women are educated and employed conflicting with traditional gender role and values, one of strategies to deal with housework or childcare is outsourcing. According to the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (2015), 25% of married couples with children received help from their parents for housework or childcare, and it increased to 53% for dual earning couples. Choi (2016) explains that married couples depend on their parents and babysitters for young children, while they depend on nursery and kindergarten as children get older. Then how much does outsourcing reduce a demand for housework and childcare? Will it change the contribution to domestic work between couple? Despite the prevalence of domestic outsourcing in Korea, none of previous studies have investigated its relationship with couple’s time worked at home. In this paper, we examine how paid or unpaid helper is associated with time spent on housework or childcare by wife and husband respectively, using panel data for nine years with individual fixed effects. We also examine how the outsourcing is associated with husband’s relative contribution to domestic work compared to wife, by types of housework.

Millennials are contributing to the declining divorce rate in U.S.