Family formation trends and patterns of women's work trajectories in South Korea: determinants and cohort differences

ABSTRACT

We use sequence analysis on data from the Korean Labor & Income Panel Study (1998–2019) to investigate trajectories of women’s labour market participation in the eight years after first childbirth. We pay special attention to the type of employment through which mothers participate in the labour market, distinguishing between regular full-time employment, non-regular employment, self-employment, and non-employment. After creating employment sequences, we use cluster analysis to reveal patterns of employment trajectories and average marginal effects derived from multinomial logistic regression to identify women’s characteristics on the distinct trajectories. We find that women of younger cohorts are less likely to solely focus on family and childcare in the years after childbirth. However, their chances of steady work in regular jobs did not increase. Instead, they are more likely to be on unsteady pathways, combining childcare with regular or non-regular jobs. Our results suggest that increases in females’ employment might be partly attributed to mothers’ higher probability to obtain precarious non-regular work.

KEYWORDS:

• Family formation
• work trajectories
• sequence analysis
• cohort differences
• non-regular employment

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Michael Gebel, Jonathan Latner, and the participants of the PAA virtual meeting 2021 for their helpful comments and suggestions to earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the Korean Labor Institute. Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for this study. Data supporting the findings of this study are available from the authors with the permission of the Korean Labor Institute.

Notes

1 The maximum value of entropy is determined by the length of the sequences and the number of sequence states (Gabadinho et al., 2011). In our sample entropy ranges from 0 to 2.16.

Additional information

Funding

This research has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC ) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreements No 758491).