Division of Labor, Gender Ideology, and Marital Satisfaction in East Asia

2015/12/22 by Yue Qian, Liana C. Sayer · 187 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #China #Demographic economics #Demography #East Asia #Economics #Family Dynamics and Relationships #Gender role #Gender studies #General Social Survey #Geography #Ideology #Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving #Marital status #Political science #Politics #Population #Psychology #Social psychology #Sociology #Survey data collection #Work-Family Balance Challenges

paper · open access · doi:10.1111/jomf.12274

published in Journal of Marriage and the Family 78(2), 383-400 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 2015/12/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Using data from the 2006 Family Module of the East Asian Social Survey (N = 3,096), this article examines associations of marital satisfaction with divisions of housework and gender ideology in four East Asian societies: urban China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Compared with Japanese and Korean married women and men, Chinese and Taiwanese spouses were more satisfied with their marriage and had more egalitarian divisions of housework, but simultaneously they held less egalitarian gender ideologies. Multivariate analyses showed that relative share of housework was negatively associated with marital satisfaction for Japanese and Korean men and for Korean and Taiwanese women. Egalitarian gender ideology was significantly associated with lower marital satisfaction only among Taiwanese women. In addition, the negative association between housework and marital satisfaction was more pronounced for Taiwanese women who espoused more egalitarian gender ideologies. The authors discuss how differences in macro-level social contexts explain these cross-society variations.

Citations

• She Left, He Left: How Employment and Satisfaction Affect Women’s and Men’s Decisions to Leave Marriages
• Gender and Fairness: Marital Satisfaction in Two-Earner Couples
• China's One‐Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters
• The deinstitutionalization of American marriage

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