Negotiating Work and Family Life in South Korea : Class Differences among Working Women
Journal of Korean Women’s Studies. Lee Jae-Kyung, Lee Euna, and Cho Joo-Eun (2006)
In this study, we tried to analyze the experiences and differences of the work and family life among married women workers and also tried to examine changes in patriarchal family arrangements. The previous studies mainly discussed on workingwomen’s double burden and work family conflicts. However, as the job security for individual workers become worse and class differences become widen in the global capitalist economy, the differences among working women also have been magnified according to their occupational position. We have conducted in-depth interviews with 19 married working women; ten of them hold professional or managerial jobs with college diploma; nine women are production and service workers with high school education or lower. Regardless of their class positions, married woman workers have double burdens of work and family, but the strategies for the double responsibility and their gender relationship appear slightly different upon their class positions. The service and production workers enter easily to the labor market. However with their childbirth, they are expelled from or leave the job because of unstable employment status as well as lack of their social resources to replace child care. On the other hand, women professionals and managers maintain their jobs after childbirth with mobilizing kinship network and resources. Among these women, it appears common to have long working time and work-oriented life and to desire to have social and economic rewards through their occupational endeavors. Service and production workers tend to show aspirations for becoming full-time mother that can solve conflicts between their work and family life. Professional and managerial workers reveal their desires to be a good wife who cares for husband’s domestic needs.
