King's College London

One parent stays late at work. The other leaves in time for nursery pickup, then logs on again after their child has gone to bed. Both have jobs. But their working lives are not equal.

New research from King’s Business School suggests this divide is particularly common among families with young children in South Korea. In over a third of dual-earner couples with preschool children, the mother and father worked contrasting hours or schedules. Among couples without preschool children, the figure was closer to one in four.

Fathers generally worked longer or later. Mothers were more likely to work shorter hours or during the conventional daytime.

The study, published in Social Indicators Research, looked at 2,089 married couples and explored how long, when and where each partner worked.

Looking across all the couples in the study, almost half were in households where both partners generally worked conventional daytime hours at their usual workplace. The remaining couples followed three broad patterns. In some, both partners worked long and late. In others, men worked longer and later than women. A smaller group included women who worked from home, often into the evening, while their male partners maintained longer hours.

Across every pattern, men remained overwhelmingly in standard or long-hours work. Most of the differences between households came from women changing their hours, schedules or place of work.

Whilst the study cannot show whether families chose these arrangements, it does highlight which partner was most likely to adapt.

In the smallest group, women worked from home and often had shorter weeks. Yet a majority of mothers in these households still carried out paid work during evenings or nights.

A shorter working week did not always mean an earlier finish. Most mothers in the homeworking group recorded paid work during evenings, or even night-time hours, when many families are serving dinner and getting young children ready for bed.

That matters in a country confronting a persistently low birth rate while trying to keep more women in work. Drawing on a 2024 review by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international economic policy body, the researchers note that Korean mothers face career penalties and pressure to leave work, contributing to the country’s gender pay gap and low fertility rate.

These mothers have not left the workforce. They still count as employed, even when their work is shorter, later or broken around care. Fathers’ working patterns changed far less. In the daily negotiation between two jobs and a young family, mothers' jobs were far more likely to accommodate the competing demands.

Read the full study, Working Time Typologies of Dual-Earner Couples in South Korea: a Multidimensional Approach to Hours, Schedules, and Location, published in Social Indicators Research.