Do Women Really Fare Better When Working Part-time?

Introduction

In the last four decades of the twentieth century, South Korean women dramatically increased their participation in paid employment. Their labor force participation rate increased from 37.0 percent in 1963 to 50.5 percent in 2008, narrowing the gender gap in the labor market participation. The increasing participation rates of the married women led many scholars to emphasize the weakening of the traditional male breadwinner model in Korea (Cho, 2000). As married women enter the labor market and the traditional gender division of labor is undermined, concerns with gender equality have been soaring in terms of the distribution of total work between men and women. Gender inequality in total work in South Korea is extreme by international standards: the ratio of Korean females’ total work hours to those of Korean males is ranked the second highest among OECD countries at 116 percent, following Italy with 128 percent ¹(UNDP, 2003). Although attitudinal changes towards sharing housework are clearly occurring, husbands of employed women do not devote commensurate time to non-market work, creating public concerns about distributional justice (Lee, 2002).

Coupled with the men’s lagged adaptation or resistance to sharing unpaid work, the labor market regime in Korea characterized by long work day and inflexibility is said to be responsible for the severe gender inequity in the distribution of total work in the event of women’s paid employment (ILO, 1999). The rate of women’s part-time employment as a percentage of total female employment is the lowest at 7.8 percent compared to 36.1 percent for Japan and 19.5 percent for the United States (OECD, 1999).² This may imply that once married women remain in the labor force, they tend to experience longer total work hours than their staying-at-home counterparts.

In solving the difficulties of accommodating needs of employed married women, part-time employment is being promoted as a strategy enhancing labor force participation of married women with children (Hwang, 2004). Part-time work may have potentially positive effects of reducing the burden imposed on married women who have to manage both paid work and family responsibilities. But experiences of developed countries demonstrate its adverse or limited impacts on both its effectiveness of inducing female employment and improving gender relations; especially when the part-time employment is envisioned as the secondary-labor market model where it is characterized by job insecurity, poor wages, and poor working conditions (Tijdens, 2002). Successes of part-time work as coping strategies for women faced with the ‘the second shift’ could be moderated by institutional contexts such as gender relations regarding equal sharing of housework or social pressure about mothers’ exclusive responsibilities for child outcomes. While a few studies have emphasized an unequal distribution of total work-paid work and unpaid work- associated with the employment of married women in general (Son, 2005; An, 2008), there have been no empirical studies conducted to assess whether part-time employment would narrow gender gaps in the total workload, when it is adopted as a family-friendly labor market regime.

This study purports to offer better understandings of the impact of married women’s employment on the distribution of the total workloads in married couples, with a focus on the impact of women’s part-time work. This study takes advantage of a nationally representative time use survey collected in 2004 that is believed to help produce precise measures of the amount of time devoted to unpaid work as well as paid work (Juster & Stafford, 1991). The author examines whether female part-time employment might reduce gender inequality in the total work in married couples. This will allow us to obtain better understanding of assessing the impacts of what is called family-friendly part-time employment on women’s economic welfare.

Previous Studies

Married women participating in the labor market both win and lose. While their own earnings may be able to give them bargaining power against their partners or purchasing power of meeting their own tastes, they come at the expense of their own leisure time. Research on the impacts of employment of married women in Western countries finds that men are irresponsive to spouses’ employment. Men’s contributions to household work and child care show invariantly little changes no matter what circumstances the household may be under (Coverman & Sheley, 1986; Greenstein, 1996; Hochschild, 1989; Nock & Kingston, 1988; Manke, Seery, Crouter, & Mchale, 1994), or weak, indirect, or no significant associations between women’s employment and men’s housework time (Hartmann, 1981; Kamo, 1991; Shelton, 1990; Shelton & John, 1996), or even less time in direct child care activities than fathers with nonemployed wives (Bryant & Zick, 1996). As Hartmann (1981) precisely points out, variations in wives’ household work time generally are not explained by variations in the contributions of other household members including husbands’ contributions to household work. Time spent by the husbands is almost invariant regardless of the wives’ employment status and hours of working. Husbands hardly contribute to household work when they are unemployed or employed part-time. She concludes that the transformation of the society into patriarchal capitalism drives women out of the domestic sphere, but women still take on no less household responsibilities than they used to. The apparent higher income of dual- earner families than that of single-earner families is made possible at the cost of women’s leisure time.

Under these circumstances, it is likely that the adjustments are made on the part of women in order to balance work and family responsibilities. Marital conflicts over time allocation among couples seem to be resolved through choices about women’s employment by dropping out of labor market or reducing their hours of work (Sanchez & Thomson, 1997). Employed wives’ overload diminishes because they make adjustments in their paid work time. However, women employed part-time to accommodate childcare responsibilities may find that they have little free time despite their part-time employment. The part-time arrangement for mothers reinforces conventional definitions of the gender division of labor (Negrey, 1993). A study of the Australian Time Use Survey finds that mothers working part-time, the most prevalent regime in Australia, have the highest total workload among groups such as working full-time, working part-time, unemployed, and not in the labor force (Craig, 2002). The labor market structure that puts women in marginalized part-time sectors may not necessarily be advantageous to women simply because it is based on assumptions that women are still responsible for family responsibilities, of which men are absolved.

The expansion of part-time employment for women could potentially constrain reorganization of paid and unpaid work in favor of gender equality in South Korea. Qualitative and quantitative studies done by Korean researchers suggest that employed mothers certainly spend less time on housework than staying-at-home mothers do, but induces minimal changes in men’s participation in unpaid work (Cho, 1994). Women’s involvement in paid work, together with attitudinal changes in gender roles and reduced family size, led men to devote more time to unpaid work, but the increase is very marginal (An, 2008). Employed women in dual-earner couples use a variety of individual strategies for balancing work and family on their part by adjusting their paid work. Employed women are less likely to work during weekends and nights, more likely to work fewer hours, and more likely to work at home (Son, 2005).

Under these conditions, part-time employment obviously reduces total workloads of married women, but might hardly change men’s participation in unpaid work. As a consequence, women’s gender role of taking primary responsibility for housework and childcare may be reinforced. The reinforcement in turn may lead to gendered specialization where men are completely exempt from family responsibilities. Therefore, part-time employment not only marginalizes women in the labor market but also intensifies gendered specialization in kinds of work, limiting positive impacts of reduced work hours in total workloads.

Method

Female Part-time Employment and Gender Equality in Total Work

This section presents a descriptive analysis of the sample used and the time allocation to paid and unpaid work and discusses regression results.

Table 1 shows an overview of characteristics of husbands and wives included in the sample by the three different household types: men one-earner households where only men are employed as wage earners while women are not participating in labor markets; women part-time households where women work less than 30 hours; and women full-time households where women work more than 30 hours. Of wives employed, only 18 percent were working part-time, indicating that the majority of dual-earner households contain women employed full-time. It confirms that the men one-earner model and the full-time dual-earner model are currently the two dominant competing regimes in Korea. This obviously raised concerns about women’s economic activities caught between remaining as professional home-makers and participating in the labor market at the risk of their heightened total workloads.

Table 1

The Sample Statistics

Weekly working hours for men are almost similar across the households. Women working part-time reported their weekly working hours as, on average, 18 hours per week whereas women working full-time work 49 hours per week, which approximates that of men. Differences in characteristics among the group to note is that women working part-time have more children aged under 18 than those working full-time, implying that par-time employment is likely to be chosen as strategies for balancing paid work and family responsibilities in households with small children. Men and women in households with women working full-time are less likely to graduate from colleges than their counterparts in the households with women working part-time.

There is no doubt from the past studies that women’s employment increases their total workloads by inevitably intensifying the gender gap through the total workload. The question then is whether women’s part-time employment could reduce their total workload. Presented first is the descriptive pictures of whether men and women in married couples would experience the gender gap in the total work by calculating average daily amounts of time spent on three areas of productive activities: paid work, housework, and child care. On average, men and women spend approximately similar hours on total work, close to 500 minutes per day. Although women appear to spend slightly less minutes on total work, the difference was only statistically significant at margins, 10 percent. It is consistent with Western countries’ experiences that men and women’s total work are converging to each other (Burda, Hammermesh, & Weil, 2007). Not surprisingly, however, the composition of ‘work’ differs by gender; with women spending almost half of their time on unpaid work demonstrating gendered specialization in kinds of work. The breakdown by the day of the week provides us with an interesting picture of another dimension of the unequal distribution of total work (See Figure 1). The distribution of total work varies substantially by the day of the week. Men, all employed, devote tremendous amounts of minutes on paid work (more than nine hours on an average day), reflecting masculine practices of long workdays in Korea. As a result, during the weekday, men’s total work time outweighs women’s. However, the gender gap in the total work time reverses on Saturday and even more drastically on Sunday, precisely because unpaid work undertaken by women vary little by the days of the week. Men’s reduced minutes of paid work on weekends contribute to even widening the gender gap despite their slight increase in housework and child care. The fact that the severe inequality takes place during the weekends, particularly on Sunday, calls into question a complex of gender dynamics within the households going beyond the structure of labor market.

Figure 1

Time Allocation to Paid Work, Housework, Care Work by the Day of Week

Figure 2

Distribution of Work and Women’s Share of Total Work by Household Type

How then does women’s employment status affect this gendered distribution of total work? Figure 2 presents the distribution of care work, housework, and paid work between men and women in different types of households depending on female employment status: not employed; part-time employment; and full-time employment. Total work includes all three, care work, housework, and paid work. All men in these household are employed as wage-earners. Part-time is defined as those who worked less than 30 hours per week. I repeated the following analyses by using the definition of part-time employment based on 20 and 35 hours, but findings remained largely intact. Therefore, the discussions and results are based on the cut-off of 30 hours.

The dual-earner model causes women to bear the unequal distribution of total work. Figure 2 shows that there are substantial variations in their total workload among women depending on their employment status and hours. The male one-earner model operates in favor of women in terms of the total workload in daily lives: women work only 86 percent of what their spouses do while women in dual-earner households work more than men do. On the other hand, women’s employment in paid work leads them to increase their total workload, with full-time employment leading to a wider gender gap. Women’s employment status has very little positive association with men’s contribution to child care and housework while reducing women’s time devoted to unpaid work, which confirms the findings from the past studies. Women working full-time perform only 35 percent of total work for unpaid activities while women working part-time perform about 60 percent. Since men are insensitive to women’s employment, wives’ own hours of paid work seem to mainly account for the extent of the gender gap in total work occurs.

This finding seems to suggest that the experience of Korean married couples with respect to the part-time employment is different from that of Australian couples where the part-time employment for married women is associated with the highest workload (Craig, 2002). It appears that the part-time employment serves as a time adjustment strategy for reducing their total work time and accommodating family responsibilities, although it falls short of achieving the equality of the total work as comparable to that of the men one-earner household. With respect to women’s share of total work out of households, for men and women combined, the total work is also lower in the households with women working part-time than in the households where women working full-time. Since the choice of part-time employment for women is clearly influenced by the presence of children, however, it seems necessary to net out the effects of children in examining the impact of part-time employment on the gender gap in total work. The sample used for this study also suggests that women’s part-time employment was found in households with more small children relative to women’s full-time employment.

Table 2

OLS Regression Results for Minutes Spent on Total Work, Weekday

Does part-time employment reduce the gender gap in total work after controlling for other control variables? To answer this, OLS regression results for the sample including only dual-earner couples is presented. Since part-time employment is likely to occur mostly during the weekdays, a different set of regressions was calculated based on weekday, Saturday, and Sunday. In Table 2, there are three different regressions: the first regression estimates a gender gap in the total work controlling for variables other than part-time dummy, the second regression adds part-time employment variable, and the final regression adds the interaction term between gender and part-time employment. The main finding of interest is whether and how the coefficient on gender changes upon the entrance of the part-time dummy when controlling for other related explanatory variables.

Table 2 presents regression results for WEEKDAY. The first regression shows the statistically significant gender gap in total work in dual-earner couples: women work 41.24 minutes more than men do. How much of this gender gap is reduced by women’s part-time employment? It finds from the second regression result that part-time employment certainly reduces the total workload for both men and women, while it slightly increases the gender gap. That is, had men and women not worked part-time, the gender gap would have been slightly greater. As can be seen from the third regression, it is mainly women’s part-time employment that helps reduce the gender gap in total work.

On the other hand, the women’s part-time employment is not a statistically significant predictor of explaining the total workload for weekends (regression results not presented). This suggests that the reduction of workweek only partly accounts for changes in the gendered distribution of total work during the weekends. The fact that the gender gap in total work is significantly greater for weekends, where daily lives are less affected by labor market regime, than for weekdays suggests persistent gender roles strongly operate as behavioral guidance when it comes to performing housework and childcare.

Table 3

Interval Regression Results for Women’s Share of Total Work

Having confirmed that women’s part-time employment reduces the gender gap in the total work across individuals, we wonder if it will substantially lower women’s share of total work within a household. This would give us a rather direct dimension of whether women’s part-time employment would relieve them of work burden and help them undertake an equal share of work relative to their spouses. As Figure 2 illustrated, women’s share of total work appeared to be slightly lower, on average, in the households with women working part-time than in households with women working full-time. Interval regression analyses show that having controlled for other explanatory variables women’s part-time employment has no statistically significant effect on women’s share of total work, although the effect is positive for weekday (See Table 3). This means that compared to households where women work full-time, women’s part-time employment could potentially increase women’s share of total work.

Conclusion

There have been growing concerns that women’s participation in the labor market makes few changes in women’s domestic responsibilities while intensifying the gender gap in the total workload at the expense of their leisure time, which has been dubbed as “the second shift” by Hochschild (1989). Adjustments in women’s paid work time and schedules are often put forward for both increasing female labor force participation and alleviating the dual burden caused by male-centered work norms and the men’s resistance to undertaking housework and childcare.

Using the Korean Time Use Survey 2004, this author investigated whether women’s part-time employment could reduce the gender gap in the total work combining paid and unpaid work in dual-earner couples. This study has concurred with previous studies that dual-earner arrangements expose women to a wider gender gap in the total work than the men one-earner arrangements. Men’s participation in unpaid work is hardly affected by women’s employment status and conditions. Given the irresponsiveness of the men, their participation in the full-time employment imposes tremendous workload on the married women, leaving women with choices of part-time employment in order to cut back on the workloads. The analysis shows that had women not worked part-time, the gender gap in the total work would have been much greater, but the gender gap still remains intact even if women’s part-time employment reduces the gap in the total work. Although women’s part-time employment reduces the gender gap across individuals, it hardly affects women’s share of total work out of household total work within households. That is, holding other things constant, women working part-time perform almost the same share of total work within households as do women working full-time. This means that women’s part-time employment operates as a strategy for reallocating their time from paid to unpaid. But the fact that the sign of the coefficient is positive for weekday and Sunday implies that women working part-time could undertake a higher share than women working full-time.

The long workweek may not be solely responsible for the observed gender gap. The variations in the gender gap in the total work across the days of the week exhibit a more complex gender dynamics play a crucial role in determining the distribution of paid and unpaid work within and across households. As long as men are reluctant to change their attitudes towards participation in unpaid work in a fundamental way, positive impacts of women’s part-time employment in reducing workloads and narrowing the gender gap would be limited, reinforcing gendered specialization in kinds of work as a major responsibility.

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