[Editorial] Men and Women and Household Chores

The National Statistical Office and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family have found that adult Korean men do only 30 percent of the housework as men in Germany and the United States. That gap exists even if you exclude couples where the woman is a full-time housewife and include only working couples. Korean men continue to avoid household duties.

The difference in how much time men and women spend doing household chores can be seen also in how much they spend at work and leisure. Working men enjoy 50 minutes more leisure time than working women, and they are able to because while they work 1 hour 24 minutes longer than women, they find the time while women do 2 hours 12 minutes more of the work around the home. Korean men spend more time on the job than women, but they have more time to relax because however much more time they spend at their places of employment, they spend less than that doing housework. American and German men enjoy 30 and 22 minutes more leisure time respectively than their women counterparts, but much of that time is earned by enjoying less sleep and personal management time.

The tendency of men to avoid housework is among other things a structural problem. Employed Korean men work 7 hours 43 minutes daily, 22 and 40 percent more than American and German men respectively. For women it is more serious, since they work 20 and 60 percent more time than women in the U.S. and Germany. The result is that employed Korean men and women spend only 57 percent the time on household chores as couples in those countries. It is not that they enjoy long leisure time, either. If you look at the average for men and women it barely compares to the U.S. but is 17 percent less than Germany. What is happening is that they are working so hard they can't find the time to look after household affairs.

That being the situation, maybe it is only natural that women are avoiding marriage and having children. It is time to on the one hand reduce working hours and expand the socialization of "care-giving work" like childcare so as to improve the overall quality of life and to encourage people to have children, and meanwhile the country needs to find complex and structural solutions that reduce sex discrimination.

The Hankyoreh, 28 December 2005.

[Translations by Seoul Selection]