The Effects of Housework on Women’s Career Interruption in Dual-earner Couples

• In Event: 2266 - Family Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 9. Gender Division Labor and Women's Career Interruption

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of housework on women's career interruption in dual-earner couples.
BACKGROUND: Previous studies on women leaving employment have covered perspectives such as family and life-course and the labor market. Few empirical studies have examined how a couple’s paid and unpaid care work affects a woman’s career maintenance or interruption. In this study, we analyzed the gendered effects of housework time on career interruption.
METHOD: The data were drawn from the sixth wave of “the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women & Families (KLoWF) 2007-2016.” We selected 1,718 female respondents in dual-earner couples over six wave of data, which produced a total of 3,645 cases of unbalanced panel data. We employed the random and fixed effects logistic regression with jackknife estimation.
RESULTS: We found that females’ career interruption increase when they spent more time on housework than males. Moreover, males’ housework is a key factor in decreasing the likelihood that their spouses would leave employment.
CONCLUSION: A greater burden of housework for female spouses increases the possibility of their quitting careers, and a greater amount of housework performed by male spouses increases the possibility of maintaining career. In particular, men’s participation in housework had the most consistent and strong effect on decreasing women’s career interruption across all models.
IMPLICATION: Given the fact that many working women in dual-earner couples suffer from excessive burdens in dual-obligations at family and work, the results imply that gender-equal distribution of housework in the household is the substantive key to supporting women’s career maintenance.

Authors

• Noeul Kim, Yonsei University

• Chan-Ung Park, Yonsei University

• Sun Mi Cho, Yonsei University