Women's Employment Stability and Their Childbearing Decisions in Korea

Background/Purpose: The total fertility rate (TFR) has rapidly decreased in South Korea since the early 1980s, with the TFR eventually reaching its lowest at 0.98 per woman in 2018. Female employment patterns in Korea, manifesting the M-curve patterns that involve a marked drop in employment during the childbearing years, imply that a sizeable number of women still have difficulty reconciling their work and family life. Previous research has extensively examined the relationship between women’s labor market participation and childbirth. Yet, little attention has been paid to how disparity in women’s employment characteristics, especially employment stability affects their childbearing decisions. Korea’s labor market displays highly pronounced duality that results in very divergent conditions for work-family life, in terms of access to social protection, economic and employment security. Hence, the opportunity cost of entering motherhood might vary with the stability of employment. This study aims to examine how women’s employment stability affects their motherhood entry in the context of Korea’s dual labor market environment.

Methods: Event history analysis is used to estimate the causal models in which the probability of women’s first conception depends on women’s employment status which varies with time. The data are from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Survey (KLIPS) Waves 1–19 (1998–2016). KLIPS provides information on retrospective employment status, marriage, and delivery history, which enables to situate the exact timing of one’s childbirth and labor market entry and exit. The sample consists of women aged from 15 to 45 with at least one month of work experience. To capture employment stability, variables such as years of service, workplace sector, permanent or temporary contract, size of the firm, and regular or irregular job are included.

Results: The study found that there exists a positive association between women’s childbearing and employment stability. Once women are employed, those with one or more years of work experience for the same employer transit significantly faster to their first birth than others with less than one year of work experience (42%). In Korea, a large-sized company provides the most employment security, a better work-life balance, and generous corporate policies for motherhood, whereas small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) offer limited benefits. Aligned with this reality, the estimation shows that women in large corporations are more likely to enter motherhood than those in SMEs (13%). Similarly, civil servants are given the most generous parental leaves without risk of losing their job after maternity leaves. The estimation of the workplace sector reflects this, showing that women in the public sector (61%) are more likely to become a mother than those in the private sector. Finally, women with regular jobs are more likely to decide on childbirth (21%) than those with irregular jobs.

Conclusions/Implications: The role of policies reconciling women’s work and family life is limited for women in unstable employment, thus calling for fundamental improvement in the Korean labor market situation so as to provide a more supportive condition for motherhood.