• Journal of Family Relations
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.47-72
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• 2017

Objectives: Do husbands with working wives share domestic labor more equally than husbands with unemployed housewives? Is the husband's contribution sufficient enough to satisfy his wife? These questions have long inspired many researchers to find ways to more accurately estimate husband's domestic contributions and narrow the emotional gap following the different threshold of satisfaction within couples, but not without some limits. This study attempted to figure out an answer to the above-mentioned subject by using time diaries of Korean married couples with a preschooler as their first-born child and relying on the typology of husbands' sharing of housework and childcare, which allowed me to overcome some limitations of prior research. Method: I analyzed a total of 1,716 diaries of 858 married couples from 2014 Korea Time Use Survey with descriptive statistics, t-test, cluster analysis, and multinomial logit. Results: Analytic results showed that husbands in dual-earner households did share domestic labor more equally than husbands in single-earner households, but there were different types of husband's contribution depending on time they spent in housework and childcare. While more than half of husbands with employed wives shared more or less than ten percent of domestic labor, the rest were divided into one group of husbands who shared both housework and childcare more heavily and evenly, and another group who were mainly involved in childcare duties. It is interesting that husbands who made the least contributions to domestic labor were not the ones with the lowest level of satisfaction with their sharing of household labor, whereas their wives were deeply dissatisfied, leading to a huge emotional gap within couples. Conclusion: Identifying factors associated with the three different types allowed me to find a point of intervention to narrow the emotional gap that is likely to harm the marital relationship if left unattended to.