Telling a different story: disparities in perceived fairness of housework division among East Asian men

ABSTRACT

Previous research on gender relations has overlooked the similarities and differences among East Asian societies. To fill this gap, this study investigated the association among men’s gender-role attitudes, the actual share of housework, and perceptions of fairness in housework division, and how it differs across four East Asian societies. Using data from the 2012 International Social Survey Programme, the results demonstrated that Japanese and Taiwanese men had more egalitarian attitudes than mainland Chinese and South Koreans, while mainland Chinese men did more housework. Korean men held the most traditional gender-role attitudes and were least likely to feel they did less than their fair share. The paper concludes with implications for the gender revolution, suggesting policies should promote men’s involvement in the family besides helping mothers balance work and family.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender revolution
• gender-role attitudes
• gendered division of household labour
• perceived fairness
• East Asia

Acknowledgment

Menghan Zhao acknowledges support provided by a research grant from the National Social Science Fund of China [20&ZD173]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This study excluded cohabiting couples because there is a low prevalence of cohabitation in East Asian societies (Raymo et al., 2015).

2 We conducted t-tests and chi-square tests for the differences between the removed observations and the analytical sample in the other variables. Spouses’ work hours per week for the removed respondents were statistically shorter than those in the analytical sample. For the relative household income, a higher proportion of the removed respondents was in the highest and the lowest quartile categories than the respondents in the analytical sample. The differences for the other variables were not statistically significant.

3 We did not impute the missing values for the main variables because we did not have suitable auxiliary variables. We also attempted multiple imputations for gender-role attitudes, which led to 1845 observations. The results were consistent.

4 The Cronbach’s alpha of the four items was 0.56. A relatively low alpha level might be common for the scale of attitudes towards gender equality (Aassve et al., 2015). Yet, Cronbach’s alpha is much higher for the Japanese sample (0.72) than other societies (Mainland China: 0.53, Taiwan: 0.50, and Korea: 0.48).

5 The reported men’s share of housework might be overestimated because the amount of housework done by their spouses was reported by men, too.

6 We also tried models with the categorical variable (i.e. no work, part-time job with less than 40 h per week, and a full-time job with 40 h or more per week) instead of the absolute measure of weekly work hours as robustness checks. The results were consistent.