Dependence on Family Ties and Household Division of Labor in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan

Abstract

In this study, I analyze how household labor is divided between wives and husbands in three East Asian countries, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. In explaining the persistent gender differences in the time spent on housework, two hypotheses have been proposed to explain the relationship between women's relative earnings and the time they spend on housework: the resource bargaining hypothesis and the gender display hypothesis. These two hypotheses are usually considered to be competing, but recent comparative studies have revealed that the extent to which women's relative earnings affect the sharing of housework with their husbands is moderated by societal factors, particularly social policies and the level of gender inequality in the labor market. This paper adds another contextual factor: the dependence on family ties. The result shows that gender display, that is, the curvilinear relationship between women's ‘relative earnings’ and the time they devote to housework, is strong in all three countries. However, the interaction between the dependence on family ties and women's relative resources was significant in Taiwan, where the gender display pattern was observed only among couples co-residing with parents; among couples not co-residing with parents, the relationship between women's relative resources and housework was close to the pattern predicted by the resource bargaining hypothesis.

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