Holding a 'Workshop for seeking for alternatives to low births and for balancing family matters and women's jobs through examining women's broken careers'

Past September 13, we at the KWWA held a 'Workshop for seeking for alternatives to low births and for balancing family matters and women's jobs through examining women's broken careers.' It aimed to have better understanding of Korean women's broken careers and make practical and feasible policy suggestions for Korean women.

In order to grasp the situations and states of women's broken careers, we at the KWWA conducted a survey targeting 1,181 women who have children aged less than 10 years old. We found those who have experienced job changes accounted for 80% out of the total respondents: specifically, 71% who answered they had to stop working due to child birth, and 8.9% who had to change their jobs. It shows child birth is the major cause of women's broken careers. Especially, regular women workers form 62.9% before their child deliveries, but only 28.5% of women who have babies can work as regular workers when they are re-employed after their child birth, which means Korean women's broken careers and irregularization mainly resulted from child delivery. In addition, it was found that only 10% of irregular workers took maternity leaves, which demonstrates irregular workers have more serious broken careers than regular women workers do. That is to say, we found that irregular workers' pregnancy and baby birth have crucial influences on Korean women's broken careers and re-employment types.

 

In the workshop, presented was in-depth interview results regarding restrictions on balancing family matters and jobs, targeting men and women in their 30s. In reality, uncertainty has been increasing and it was found so difficult for those women who are university graduates wanting to be re-employed to re-enter the labor market, and further, women's jobs are mostly irregularized and casualized due to the distorted market structure in which young women are preferred and women have to retire from their jobs because of their pregnancies. The stereotype on gender division of work and long working hours force men to give up their participation in caring children, which is very stressful and burdensome to Korean women, since women have to take care of house work, childcare and their jobs, as well. Male interviewees in their 30s and 40s taking part in the in-depth interviews attributed their difficulties in balancing the two matters to Korean Confucianism-based work culture including heavy workloads, long working hours, strict job hierarchy, widely spread job insecurity amongst workers, and only success-oriented culture. They emphasized that people's minds should be changed to encourage men to care for their jobs and children, both, and Korean job culture should also be improved in order to ensure proper and punctual working hours and help men enjoy time with their family, through the introduction of various support systems.