TOWARDS A CARING AND GENDER-EQUAL ECONOMY IN SOUTH KOREA: HOW MUCH DOES THE REGULATION OF LABOR MARKET WORKING HOURS MATTER?

The South Korean economy faces the multiple challenges of an aging society, falling fertility rates along with one of the largest gender employment and wage gaps in the OECD. On-going policy interventions present a multi-pronged approach entailing provisioning of child and eldercare services and subsidies, extended parental and other care leave benefits, increasing the minimum wage, and more recently reduction of statutory maximum limits to weekly employment hours from a staggering 68 to 52 hours. We use a unique time-use survey on care arrangements by couples with small children in order to explore the potential of reduction of full-time market work hours towards narrowing of the gender gaps in paid and unpaid work.

Our findings show that a phased reduction of the maximum limit to weekly employment hours to 52 and further to 40 hrs/week has a significant impact on increasing men’s care work time, thereby reducing women’s unpaid work time and increasing their employment hours. We also observe that such an intervention improves the wellbeing of both women and men by closing the gap between parents’ actual and desired childcare time. The regulation of statutory weekly work hours along decent work standards in South Korea can serve as a transformative policy intervention in narrowing the gender gaps in paid and unpaid work and improving the wellbeing of workers with heavy care responsibilities.