Norms about childcare, working hours, and fathers’ uptake of parental leave in South Korea

ABSTRACT

The number of leave-taking fathers in South Korea has quintupled in the last five years, but those taking leave are still a minority of the total eligible fathers. These minority fathers, however, take some of the longest leave in the world. Driven by such notable trends, this paper inquires how norms about childcare and working hours shape Korean fathers’ decision to take leave as well as work-family balance after leave. I find that fathers are often pushed to take leave as a last resort in light of poor work-family balance and absence of more desirable alternatives to care for a young child. While these conditions continue to constrain parents after the end of the fathers’ leave, fathers respond in divergent ways: making continued effort to balance employment and family life, reverting to work-centric lifestyles with grandparental support, or going through career changes to address continued childcare needs. My findings highlight that incentives targeting fathers to take leave need to go hand in hand with more fundamental reforms to working hours and reliable ECEC to sustainably support gender equality and work-family balance of dual-earner parents.

KEYWORDS:

• Fathers’ uptake of leave
• work-family balance
• gender equality
• childcare
• employment

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Because the parental leave statistics are also administered separately by sector and most publicly available statistics to date are based on private sector employees only, presenting a holistic picture which is inclusive of both sectors is difficult (see Table A1 of the appendix).

2 In addition, female workers are eligible for 90 days of paid maternity leave and male workers ten days of paid paternity leave (formerly five days, of which three were paid).

3 This includes non-standard contracted workers, self-employed workers, those who work under 15 h per week and/or in the informal economy, as well as casualised workers and/or employees of small businesses who do not join employment insurance (Statistics Korea, 2018).

4 83 percent of private sector employees in Korea work in small or medium sized companies with less than 300 employees. This means that most workers were not subject to working hour reductions in 2020, when the data collection for this research took place. The same goes for the majority of the interviewed fathers; only five interviewees were employed in large companies at the time of interview.

5 Korea has a split ECEC system, with kindergartens categorised as educational institutions governed under the Ministry of Education and typically providing half-day education for children aged 3 to 5. In contrast, childcare centres provide institutional or home-based all-day care and education for children aged 0–5 and are under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. However, the distinction between the two institutions and the service they provide are becoming more blurred these days, with the introduction of the Nuri curriculum in 2011 intended to harmonise the two services (Hwang, 2021).

6 In the case of kindergartens, the number expanded rapidly during the 1980’s but since the 1990s has been relatively stable at around 8,000 to 9,000 (Statistics Korea, 2020e).

7 In the case of private kindergartens, 45% of their annual budget is funded by public spending (Hwang, 2021).

8 Doucet suggests conducting a total of four readings, each time paying attention to reader-response reflexivity, central protagonist narrative, general narrative, and social relationships and subjectivities, and socio-structural contexts at the macro-level (see also Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Doucet, 2018; Gilligan et al., 2003).

9 van Manen proposes first developing a holistic picture of each interviewee, then purposefully focusing on certain topics of interest, and then paying attention to the details of people’s narratives (see also Rosenblatt & Wieling, 2019).

10 Among the fathers who experienced changes in their occupations or employment status after the end of the leave, in some cases this had been planned out since before the father applied for leave (for instance, one father had planned to start his own business after finishing his leave and did so) and it was not always clear whether the change in employment status was made more for reasons relating to the fathers’ career ambitions, reasons relating to the fathers’ changed state of mind, or reasons more to do with acquiring better work-family balance—sometimes it was a mixture of these. Hence, while I present the total number of fathers who experienced changes in their career or employment status in Table 1, I must note that not all of these fathers changed their employment status for reasons that the quotes of interviewees I, J, and K suggest.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Youngcho Lee

Youngcho Lee is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, Department of Sociology and also a Cambridge Trust and Murray Edwards Scholar.