Roles of Women’s Employment in a Divorce Process

In an attempt to explore whether the recent increase in divorce implies transformations in the foundation of the family, this study looks into the roles of women’s employment in the process of marital dissolution using data from the first wave of Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Family (KLoWF). The research questions involve the effects of women’s employment on the incidence of divorce or separation and on living arrangement with their children after divorce or separation. The first analysis focuses on employment characteristics at the time of marriage, and the findings suggest a rather complex relationship with marital stability. A wife’s stable white collar jobs decrease, but non-standard jobs increase marital dissolution. Quitting jobs at marriage also decreases marital dissolution. It appears that women work outside home to maximize the benefits for the family but in limited circumstances it may facilitate to break away from the bad marriages. Divorced mothers’ irregular employment slightly increases the chance of living apart from at least one child, suggesting that irregular employment does not provide incomes to maintain the family. The crude divorce rate had increased dramatically during the late 1990s and early 2000s, reaching the peak 3.6% in 2003. Although it has slightly declined since then, the rate remains much higher than a decade before. At the same time, in the past few decades women’s educational attainment has increased dramatically and various social measures have been taken place to enhance gender equality, including, most notably, the abolition of the family registration system. In such a context, one wonders if an increase in divorce reflects a transformation in the foundation of marriage from a strictly gender-segregated institution to a more gender-egalitarian one. Motivated by such a broad inquiry, this study explores whether women’s employment plays a role in the divorce process. Does employment increase the likelihood of divorce or is employment simply an inevitable choice for women who are to be economically independent after divorce? Among divorced mothers, does employment affect the likelihood of custody of their children, either facilitating or hindering co-residence? Previous findings on the relationships between women’s employment and divorce are inconclusive. Over the past several decades in the West, increases in married women’s employment have paralleled with rises in divorce rates, but at the individual level, causal influences between women’s employment and divorce are not straightforward. As discussed below, women’s employment increases the chance of divorce only under certain circumstances (Oppenheimer 1997; Sayer and Bianchi 2000). It is suspected that the causal relationships are bilateral and occurring at various stages of marital dissolution process possibly in conjunction with other circumstances. In Korea, women’s labor force participation rate has increased only slightly over the past few decades and remained stable in recent several years at approximately 50% (KOSIS 2009). The slow growth is partly due to industrialization of the economy where the labor force participation rate is high in rural areas and particularly low among married women in urban areas. Only about 40% of urban married women are working even at their late 30s and 40s when the rates reach the highest among all ages (2% sample 2005 Census). The labor force participation rate goes up considerably after divorce or separation, even though employment opportunities are concentrated on those jobs with relatively poor work conditions and low wages. In urban areas alone, more than 60% of divorced women in their 30s through 50s are working, a higher rate than that of married women by more than 20 percentage points (2% sample 2005 Census). What is less certain is whether married women’s employment affects the likelihood of divorce. Longitudinal (i.e., retrospective) data from the first wave