Sirin Sung

Women Reconciling Paid and Unpaid Work in a Confucian Welfare State: The Case of South Korea

The participation of married women in the labour market has been increasing since industrialization in the 1960s in Korea; in 1999 it overtook that of unmarried women. This raises the issue of how women reconcile paid and unpaid work and how state policy responds to this issue. In Korea, there have been numerous policy reforms designed to support working women in combining work and family life. For example, a parental leave scheme was introduced in 1995 and maternity benefits were also introduced in 2001. However, it is doubtful whether these policies can be effective in practice in Korea, where Confucian traditions in respect of womens roles remain strong. Confucian tradition has long influenced Korean society culturally and socially. Although Korean society today is not as Confucian as in the past, some traditions still remain strong, particularly with regard to the family: for example filial piety, seniority, the married womans responsibility for her parents-in-law. This paper will argue that Confucian tradition makes for difficulties in Korean womens experiences of reconciling paid and unpaid work and also affects the formation of state policy. The paper explores the impact of the Confucian welfare regimes on Korean womens experience of reconciling paid and unpaid care work, and questions the gendered characteristics of the Confucian welfare state.

Dimensions of Financial Autonomy in Low-/Moderate-Income Couples from a Gender Perspective and Implications for Welfare Reform

The ‘unitary household’ lives on in policymakers’ assumptions about couples sharing their finances. Yet financial autonomy is seen as a key issue in gender relations, particularly for women. This article draws on evidence from semi-structured individual interviews with men and women in thirty low-/moderate-income couples in Britain. The interviews explored whether financial autonomy had any meaning to these individuals; and, if so, to what extent this was gendered in the sense of there being differences in mens and womens understanding of it. We develop a framework for the investigation of financial autonomy, involving several dimensions: achieving economic independence, having privacy in ones financial affairs and exercising agency in relation to household and/or personal spending. We argue that financial autonomy is a relevant issue for low-/moderate-income couples, and that women are more conscious of tensions between financial togetherness and autonomy due to their greater responsibility for managing togetherness and lower likelihood of achieving financial independence. Policymakers should therefore not discount the aspirations of women in particular for financial autonomy, even in low-/moderate-income couples where there remain significant obstacles to achieving this. Yet plans for welfare reform that rely on means testing and ignore intra-household dynamics in relation to family finances threaten to exacerbate these obstacles and reinforce a unitary family model.

Within-household inequalities across classes? Management and control of money

Both women and men strive to achieve a work and family balance, but does this imply more or less equality? Does the persistence of gender and class inequalities refute the notion that lives are becoming more individualised? Leading international authorities document how gender inequalities are changing and how many inequalities of earlier eras are being eradicated. However, this book shows there are new barriers and constraints that are slowing progress in attaining a more egalitarian society. Taking the new global economy into account, the expert contributors to this book examine the conflicts between different types of feminisms, revise old debates about ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ in the gendered nature of work and care, and propose new and innovative policy solutions.

Applying Union Mobilization Theory to Explain Gendered Collective Grievances: Two UK Case Studies

This article draws on Kellys mobilization theory to identify potential stages in developing gendered collective articulation of grievances and discusses the barriers to such articulation within two case sites in the UK telecommunications sector. It focuses on employee concerns surrounding pay and working time issues arising from organizational change in two case studies from the UK telecommunications sector. Findings showed that organizational change had brought work intensification that exacerbated long hours cultures and that concerns were common to both sexes, although organizational variations in career ambitions and sense of entitlement occurred. In contrast, there was evidence that women were less willing to articulate concerns over unfair pay practices, shaped partly by a low sense of entitlement and also perceived weaknesses in potential for collective redress. The activation of grievances was severely limited by the gendered occupational and organizational structure of both workplaces and union organization within them. We conclude that there are opportunities for unions to pursue a two-pronged approach to worker mobilization by mainstreaming concerns about working time that are common to workers of both sexes with families and to activate gendered concerns around pay at workplace level.

Financial Togetherness and Autonomy Within Couples

This chapter examines the implications of the concepts of togetherness and financial autonomy for gender equality, drawing on findings from both qualitative and quantitative research. The qualitative research explored the two concepts in individual interviews with men and women in low- to moderate- income couples. The quantitative research used the British Household Panel Survey to analyse the factors affecting the differing assessments of their household income by men and women in couples across the range of incomes. The findings support the argument that an honest recognition of interdependence (or togetherness) is essential when analysing women’s financial autonomy.

Money matters: using qualitative research for policy influencing on gender and welfare reform

The UK government has been considering the design and delivery of the proposed “universal credit”, the centerpiece of its welfare reforms. The authors draw on findings from their own research, about how low/moderate-income couples manage money and negotiate gender roles, to demonstrate their relevance to exploring the gender implications of the proposals for universal credit. Findings from this and other similar studies are used to explore the value of qualitative research to policy design and debates – in particular to supplement economic modeling, which has been highly influential in driving the current UK governments thinking on welfare reform. The authors discuss the reasons why insights about gender relations within the household revealed by such qualitative research appear to have been resisted in the reform.

Work-Family Balance Issues and Policies in Korea: Towards an Egalitarian Regime?

Work-family balance has become a key issue since the late 1980s in Korea as a result of women’s increasing participation in the labour market. There have been some cultural shifts in relation to gender roles in combination with economic and political changes. In particular, the traditional idea of ‘the man as head of the family’ has recently been challenged, leading to the 2008 reform of family law (Kim 2008). In spite of these recent changes, the notion that the gendered division of labour in the Korean family has shifted from a traditional to an egalitarian model is highly questionable. To explore this, the chapter asks to what extent recent policy changes have influenced women’s experiences in reconciling paid and unpaid work in practice. It discusses women’s views on their responsibility for unpaid care work, including childcare and eldercare, and on the effectiveness of work-family balance policies. Gender imbalance in unpaid care work is not peculiar to Korean society, as it exists in the most egalitarian countries in Europe such as the Scandinavian countries. However, Korean women may encounter particular difficulties because of their special responsibilities for their parents-in-law embedded in the Confucian value system. Therefore, this chapter examines the recent changes in work-family balance policies in Korea, and it argues that in order to make the policies effective there must be cultural shifts in relation to gender roles.

Gender, work and care in policy and practice: Working mothers’ experience of intergenerational exchange of care in South Korea:

This article aims to uncover working mothers’ experiences in relation to intergenerational exchange of care and support in South Korea. It examines the impact of Confucian gender ideology on the operation of intergenerational reciprocity within the Korean family. Increasing numbers of working mothers make intergenerational exchange of care between working mothers and their family members an important issue. Although studies have focused on the importance of the Confucian virtue of filial piety in intergenerational support, little research has explored the influence of Confucian gender ideology on working mothers’ experiences of intergenerational exchange from a gender perspective. This article aims to fill this research gap by exploring the experiences of Korean working mothers in the intergenerational exchange of care. It draws on qualitative semi-structured interviews with 30 married women in paid employment in Seoul, Korea, carried out in 2014. This article argues that traditional gender expectations of married women’s responsibility for parents-in-law persist regarding intergenerational reciprocity, despite recent development of policies for care.

Gender and the work-family experience: an intersection of two domains

This edited volume is divided into three different parts which are ‘societal influences and entrenchment’, ‘considerations from the homefront’, and ‘career and organisational considerations’. Withi...

Conclusion: Confucianism or Gender Equality?

We have asked about gender assumptions in welfare states that are very different from Western ones, trying to understand women’s experience of welfare states across a range of East Asian countries. Are the welfare systems of Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Japan distinctive, with Confucian cultural assumptions hidden beneath the surface commitment to gender equality? While economies, demographies and families have been developing rapidly, are social policies becoming less traditional in their expectations of women? How different are East Asian welfare states in their assumptions about gender from Western welfare states? And how different are they from each other, in the context of varied national policies about Confucianism, from the powerful attack on Confucian gender inequalities under Chinese communism to the embrace of Confucianism under the national governments of Korea and Taiwan? What has been the impact of policies in China, designed to replace Confucian traditions, through the communist period, and of more recent free-market-based policies? Communism had a profound effect, particularly in bringing women into education and paid employment. But what assumptions now underpin social policies, and how are they experienced in practice?