Is gender inequality a barrier to realizing fertility intentions? Fertility aspirations and realizations in South Korea

ABSTRACT

Research highlights the emergence of national low fertility regimes and the importance of understanding how institutional gender inequity supports low fertility. In South Korea, where gender inequality is high and a national low fertility regime exists, many women express a desire for two children but bear one child. Does gender equity, particularly within the household, influence the realization of fertility desires within the context of institutional inequality? Using the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women & Families, in this paper, I test the effect of gender equity within the family on second births. Evaluating a subsample of married women with one child who desire a second child, I find that women’s gender role attitudes, husbands’ housework and women’s responsibility for children’s education influence the likelihood of realizing a second birth. Results highlight the importance of men’s household contributions and women’s educational responsibilities on the realization of fertility intentions within low fertility regimes.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender equity
• low fertility
• men’s housework and childcare
• household decision-making
• educational responsibility
• education fever
• South Korea

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for detailed and helpful comments from Cynthia Buckley, Frances Goldscheider, the editor and anonymous reviewers of Asian Population Studies. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 2015, Chicago.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. According to the 2010 Korean National Survey on Family, the majority of South Korean men and women (61%) view a two-child family as ideal and another 20% identify three children as ideal.

2. Saeromaji plan is a policy initiative established during the Lee Myung-Bak administration to address income polarization. Areas of focus include employment, education, childcare, and welfare (Government of Korea, 2006).

3. There were a total of 545 married mothers of parity 1, under the age of 40 at Wave 1. Of those, 304 women expressed positive intentions for a second child at Wave 1.

4. The interval between Wave 1 and Wave 2 is 12 months; the interval between Wave 2 and Wave 3 is 24 months.

5. Of women who expressed no intended second birth (N = 241), only 19 women reported a second birth by Wave 3. It is impossible to know if these reflect unplanned pregnancies, spousal desires for another child or other factors. My central question concerns identifying factors, with an emphasis of the role of gender equity in the family, relating to the realization of their intended birth, so I opted to focus on women who expressed fertility intentions for a second child. I excluded respondents who were pregnant at the time of interview at Wave 3 (N = 25). Little attention has been paid to unintended fertility in Asian low fertility setting with an exception of Raymo, Musick, and Iwasawa’s (2014) recent study examining educational differences in unintended first births in Japan. In most cases, however, studies on unintended fertility, including Raymo et al.’s (2014) examine retrospective fertility intentions as the dependent variable. This approach is different from the one that I wanted to test in this paper, given that I focus on the realization of prospective fertility intentions.

6. For my analytic sample, the average hours of household labour fulfilled by their husbands were 1.39 hours. Thus, relative sharing of spent hours on housework and childcare between couples does not provide enough variations to test its effect. United Nation assessments in 2003 (United Nations, 2003) also revealed that South Korean women spent 4.6 times more hours on unpaid work, housework and childcare than men. This is far higher than rates experienced, for example, by Dutch women (2.4) or Australian women (1.8).

7. The average number of respondents' siblings is 3.24.

8. I tested issues of multicollinearity among independent variables and found no problem.

9. Similarly, there is evidence of threshold effects of housework on wages for married women and men (e.g., Hersch, 2009).

10. The age pattern of fertility in 2013 shows its peak fertility occurring in women in the age group 30-34 (111.4 per 1000 females) and the abrupt decline after 35. The respective age-specific fertility rates for women in the age group 35–39 and 40–44 are 39.5 and 4.8 per 1000 females with the TPFR of 1.19 (Statistics Korea, 2013).