Just 30% of families with young children have two incomes

Only 3 in 10 families with children under the age 14 have both parents working in South Korea, markedly lower than the average for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member economies, the government said in a report Monday.

According to the report by the Ministry of Employment and Labor, 29.4 percent of Korean families with children aged 14 or younger were dual-income households, far less than the OECD average of 58.5 percent.

The largest number of Korean households with children (46.5 percent) had one breadwinner and one adult not working. That figure is much higher than the equivalent figure for the OECD, of 31 percent.

In the report that used the OECD Family Database and the Labor Ministry’s statistics, the ministry cited the practice of working long hours and the burden for housework falling overwhelmingly on women as key reasons behind the low proportion of double-income households in the country. 

In Korea, 16.5 percent of the housework was done by men, who spent only 45 minutes on domestic work per day, the lowest among the OECD countries. In the OECD, men did 33.6 percent of the housework on average, spending 138 minutes per day.

Some 23.1 percent of Koreans worked longer than 50 hours and had 14.7 hours of spare time. In the OECD, 13 percent of people worked longer than 50 hours and had 14.9 hours of free time on average, the report showed.

When children are 2 years old or younger, 34.4 percent of households from the OECD nations had both parents working. The proportion increased to 47.6 percent when the kids were aged between 6 and 14. During the same period, the percentage of Korean dual-income households rose from 19.6 percent to 25.7 percent.

“The work environment in Korea is not woman-friendly, so the proportion of households with a male breadwinner is still high,” Kim Kyung-sun, an official in charge of the report from the ministry.

“As seen in the analysis, men need to more actively participate in housework and the practice of working long hours should be fixed.”

By Ock Hyun-ju (laeticia.ock@heraldcorp.com)