Most postindustrial societies have experienced a gender revolution as women advanced in the public sphere and populations adopt increasingly egalitarian attitudes toward gender in relation to the family, work, and politics. Yet men's views and behaviors have been slower to change than women's, and institutions--such as norms and practices in the family and the workplace--have resisted cultural pressure to fully embrace gender equality. My work focuses on South Korea (hereafter "Korea"), where men as well as work and family institutions have remained largely unsupportive of gender equality. Contemporary Korea is markedly different from other Western societies both in terms of family and work institutions. Despite women's advances in education and labor market (Park and Lee 2017), Confucian patriarchal ideology also continues to underpin family institutions in South Korea (Sung 2003). As such, the traditional marriage institution expects men to be family providers and women to remain subservient, focus on housework and childcare, and prioritize family over work and economic independence (Oh 2018; Raymo et al. 2015). In addition, the labor market in Korea is characterized by a strong ideal worker norm that promotes extreme long hours and dedication to work over any other responsibilities (Brinton and Oh 2019). In fact, Korean workers have averaged the longest work week and the highest prevalence of working 50 or more hours per week among high-income countries (OECD 2018). A culture of extreme long hours often keeps men from contributing to domestic responsibilities and helps maintain gender inequality in the family domain. I examine how this dynamic contributes to a "crisis of family" in Korea, which has recently experienced some of the largest declines in marriage and fertility in the world. National population projections in South Korea reveal that more than one-third of young men and a quarter of young women born in 1985 and after will never marry. My dissertation examines negative marital intentions and gender inequality within marriage through three distinct research papers. One of the most prominent theories of contemporary family trends, the gender revolution framework, predicts a return to "more family" in very low fertility societies as gender-egalitarian attitudes gains increasingly dominant normative status. In the first chapter, I provide a new theoretical explanation that links growing egalitarian ideals to a decline in family formation using the case of South Korea, which recently experienced a revolution in gender attitudes. This study first documents a new "gender war" that has played out online and offline in the last five years. The small, silent gender war that was ongoing online first received a significant public attention in 2015 with feminists' outcries over a small group of right-wing men's online grievances and slurs against young Korean women. The war intensified in May 2016 with a misogynistic murder of a young woman in public, which reinforced the burgeoning feminist movement and anti-patriarchal sentiments. Using archival and internet data, this study suggests that the murder increased public attention to misogyny and feminism, topics that have been largely ignored previously. This study then examines the associations between the timing of the murder and trends in egalitarian gender attitudes and age-specific marriage rates, separately. My findings show that trends in egalitarian attitudes, which were declining since 2009, significantly increased after 2016, particularly among young adults. In addition, age-specific marriage rates significantly declined after the quarterly-year of May 2016. These results suggest that young adults, whose awareness of entrenched misogyny and ideological support for gender equality recently grew, began to increasingly reject marriage. These findings suggest that young people's desires for gender equality may have clashed with persistently gendered expectations and practices within marriage. This chapter indicates that the relationship between progress towards egalitarian gender ideals and family formation may be negative in contexts where the traditional marriage institution remains resistant to change while young adults' ideals do not. My second and third chapters focus on labor market factors as important sources of the persistent gender inequality in the family and, first examining competing explanations for declining marital intentions in Korea and then investigating employment status and the division of domestic labor within marriage. The share of young adults intending to never marry is growing in East Asia, but there are competing explanations for this decision. My second dissertation chapter explores two possible explanations: demanding work conditions (constraints) and the desire to develop one's career (preference). Using data collected between 2015 to 2017 from a large, nationally representative sample of recent college graduates in South Korea (N = 50,331), the study examines the association between work demands and work-related attitudes and marriage intentions among women and men. Consistent with the demanding work hypothesis, results from logistic regressions showed that working 50 or more hours per week, commuting 2 or more hours per day, and working in professional occupations increased the likelihood of expressing negative marital intentions for both women and men. Access to family leave policies decreased the likelihood of intending to avoid marriage for women only. Contrary to the preference for work hypothesis, results showed that individuals who value personal growth and self-interest as the important quality in a job were less likely to have negative marital intentions. The positive associations between work demands and negative marital intentions were largely unaffected by work-related attitudes. Overall, the findings support the demanding work hypothesis in explaining negative marital intentions among young people in Korea and provide important implications for family-friendly workplace policies and arrangements. In the third chapter, I focus on the association between employment status and the division of domestic labor within marriage. A voluminous literature has shown that women's lower economic resources, relative to their spouses', decreases their bargaining power and increases their share of domestic labor within marriage. I examine the associations between women's contingent work, a type of devalued employment, and allocation of domestic labor in Korea, where there is a sharp divide in employment quality between permanent and contingent work. Using longitudinal data from 5,000 married women in Korea and fixed-effect analysis, this study reveals that women in contingent positions shoulder a greater share of domestic labor compared to women in permanent positions even after accounting for tangible rewards including wages and access to fringe benefits. I also find that the negative associations between women's income share and their housework share was weaker for women in contingent positions than for those in permanent positions. These results suggest that contingent employment may have deeper negative consequences on women's bargaining power in marriage. Ever greater numbers of young women are employed in insecure positions in Korea, which will have implications for gender inequality in the family domain in the future. In sum, my dissertation makes both theoretical and empirical contribution to our understanding of the linkages between gender inequality, employment conditions, and marriage decline. My findings have important implications for a range of public and private initiatives that could support gender equality and union formation in Korea. First, creating flexible and family-friendly workplace will help young adults form partnerships where they can combine work and family. Second, my findings also underscore the need for changes to the normative and institutional factors that continue to enforce traditional gender relations and behaviors among young adults to promote family formation in Korea.

Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema is about the changing constructs of modernity, masculinity, and gender relations and discourses in Korean literature and cinema during the crucial decades of the colonial and postcolonial era, based on close historical examination and a wide-ranging theoretical foundation that look at both western and Korean language sources. It examines Korean literary and cinematic texts from the period that spans from the1920s to the 1960s to reveal the ways in which many arrivals of modernity in Korea_through the traumatic pathways and contexts of colonialism, nation building, war, and industrialization_destabilize and set in flux the notions of gender, class, and nationhood. It probes into some of the most significant aspects of Korean culture in the earlier part of the twentieth century through an interdisciplinary inquiry that deploys methods and seminal texts from the fields of Korean Studies, Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Film Studies. Each chapter is an exploration of a decade, organized around questions about modernity, gender, class, and the nation that are central to understanding the selected texts and their contexts. The nation of Korea has been under threat since the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945). Crisis of Gender and the Nation critically analyzes the cultural responses of the nation and its gendered subjects in crisis, represented in a selection of Korean literary and cinematic texts from the colonial period, beginning in the 1920s, to the postcolonial period, up to the 1960s, through the lens of both Western and Korean discourses of gender and postcolonial inquiries of literature and film. It delineate the connection between the construction of the nation as a unified, sovereign entity and the ideal of the new Korean masculinity, to show how Korea's Confucian patriarchal tradition and its hold on the national imagination endures over the turbulent decades under examination, by adapting to the new surroundings and social mores, even while its core assumptions and values remain unchanged in significant ways.

The Routledge Handbook of East Asian Gender Studies presents up-to-date theoretical and conceptual developments in key areas of the field, taking a multi-disciplinary and comparative approach. Featuring contributions by leading scholars of Gender Studies to provide a cutting-edge overview of the field, this handbook includes examples from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong and covers the following themes: theorising gender relations; women’s and feminist movements; work, care and migration; family and intergenerational relationships; cultural representation; masculinity; and state, militarism and gender. This handbook is essential reading for scholars and students of Gender and Women’s Studies, as well as East Asian societies, social policy and culture.

This aim of this open access book is to launch an international, cross-disciplinary conversation on fatherhood engagement. By integrating perspective from three sectors -- Health, Social Policy, and Work in Organizations -- the book offers a novel perspective on the benefits of engaged fatherhood for men, for families, and for gender equality. The chapters are crafted to engaged broad audiences, including policy makers and organizational leaders, healthcare practitioners and fellow scholars, as well as families and their loved ones.

This book maps the emerging impact of the economic crisis on people in different contexts, and suggest policy and practice changes. Authors include researchers as well as policymakers and development practitioners, who analyse the initial impacts of the economic crisis in South and East Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.

"The perceptions of the role of women and men in families have changed over the past few decades. Men are no longer perceived as the economic providers to families. The role of men in the family has undergone many "diverse demographic, socio-economic and cultural transformations" impacting the formation, stability and overall well-being of families. In light of this development, DESA's Division for Social Policy and Development (DSPD) launched a new publication on "Men in Families and Family Policy in a Changing World" on 17 February focusing on the shifting roles and views of men in families."--Provided by publisher.

In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive