A joint wedding ceremony of multicultural couples takes place in Seoul on October, 2017. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, March 2 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean men married to foreign women tend to be more cooperative than others when it comes to rearing a child or doing chores at home.
Kim Seok-yeong, holding a master’s degree from Ewha Women’s University, studied 2,998 multicultural couples from the 2015 Family Survey and 11,744 multicultural couples from the 2015 National Multicultural Family Survey.
She scored the participant’s responses from 1 to 5, with 5 indicating strong gender equality.
Asked if husbands were as responsible for rearing their children as mothers are, South Korean men with an immigrant wife scored 4.25 points, while others scored 3.96.
Asked if double breadwinners should be equally responsible for home chores, husbands from a multicultural family scored 3.6 points, while others scored 3.52.
On the other hand, husbands from non-multicultural families tended to oppose the idea of men working while women take care of the family (3.09 points), while those from multicultural families tended to agree (2.95 points).
“This shows that South Korean husbands from multicultural families tend to be more patriarchal than others when it comes to their perception of gender roles,” Kim said.
Husbands with migrant wives tend to seem ‘less patriarchal’ when it comes to child rearing or doing chores at home, however, most likely because the wife’s lack of familiarity towards the Korean language and culture push husbands to take up roles normally completed by mothers, Kim argued.
H. M. Kang (hmkang@koreabizwire.com)
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