Dr. Ekaterina Hertog, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford

On December 4th 2014, Dr. Ekaterina Hertog, a family sociologist in the Department of Sociology and the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies at Oxford, visited IPSS to give a presentation entitled “How many children do we want? Does housework participation matter? Evidence from South Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan”. In this presentation, she focused on the relationship between housework participation and couple’s ideal family size and showed differences and similarities among East Asian countries.

Abstract:
Analysing data of East Asian Social Survey 2006, this paper investigates whether housework participation affects married couples' aspirations for the number of children in families in four East Asian countries: South Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan. We find significant differences in housework participation in the four countries. In all the countries women do much more housework than men, but in South Korea and Japan, they have virtually no help from men. In addition to these differences there are also similarities in the way housework participation affects individual fertility aspirations. Men are only slightly affected by the extent of housework sharing in all the four countries studied. Women aspire to have more children if their husbands are more willing to share household tasks. Given the social and institutional obstacles to men's greater housework participation in many East Asian countries, this finding bodes ill for the future fertility trends in the region.

This research meeting was a part of “Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in Japan: Trends, Causes and Social Implications” funded by the Ministry of Education Scientific Research Grant.