Attitudes Toward Married Womens Employment in Korea and Japan : Implications from Latent Class Analyses

Abstract

In this article, we compare attitudes towards married women's employment in Korea and Japan using 2002 ISSP and 2003 KGSS data. In particular, we use the method of latent class analysis to investigate the structure of the viewpoints about wives' economic activities. We find that Japanese women and men are more liberal in their attitudes toward married women's employment than their Korean counterparts. Then applying the method of latent class analysis, we find that Korean women and men can be classified as four and two groups respectively, in terms of their attitudes towards wives' economic activities, and that both Japanese women and men can be divided into three groups. These differences in the structure of attitudes towards wives' labor force participation may be due to a number of institutional differences in the labor force experiences of women, especially, the childcare system and gender discrimination.