In Korea, the rate of women attending higher education has already catched up that of men, but there still remains serious gender gap in labor market participation. The fact that even highly educated women tend to leave their work due to chlidrearing,... In Korea, the rate of women attending higher education has already catched up that of men, but there still remains serious gender gap in labor market participation. The fact that even highly educated women tend to leave their work due to chlidrearing, causes the employment rate of highly educated women of Korea much lower than that of other OECD countries. Such trend means that in-depth understanding about balancing career and personal life - mainly childrearing - with regard to Korea's cultural and historical context is necessary. However, previous research doesn't fully capture the life of highly educated working mothers with young children in such context. The purpose of this study is to examine the experiences of highly educated working mothers from a Cultural Historical Activity Theoretical (CHAT) perspective. The specific research questions are as such: First, in which cultural and historical context do working mothers live, and how do working mothers position their work and childrearing activity? Second, what personal challenges and structural contradictions do they confront? Third, how do they manage and deal with such problems and what are the consequences? Qualitative in-depth interviews were undertaken with 7 highly educated working mothers with the youngest child under 7-years old. Each participants were met at least 3 times during the period of 8 months and each interview took around 1 or 2 hours. All of the interviews were recorded and transcribed to be used as research data. The expanded model of activity systems was adopted as the framework for content analysis. Here the expanded version means the model of multiple activity systems with a shared subject, instead of an object, at the center. The main findings are as follows. First, it was obvious that the interviewees were in their child rearing period when they were in the middle of the earlier phase of their career. In a socio-cultural dimension, the interviewees had to be in charge of taking care of both their work and child as there was a cultural climate of regarding childrearing as marginal labor for women. In such context, the interviewees had to put their children first, as number one priority and adjust their working conditions to fit their childrearing conditions. Second, there were discordance at the personal psychological level, the social relational level, and the societal activity system level. As discussed in earlier works of role conflict theories, working mothers had mental conflicts and troubles but that was merely a part of the structural contradiction. While working mothers tried to juggle work and child rearing activity by strictly separating them and fixing boundaries, working the two activities needed fluid and flexible adjustment and revisioning. Third, the interviewees coped with the situations they confronted in a passive and adaptive way, then gradually learned to handle the contradictions by flexibly setting and resetting the boundary's of their work and childrearing activity. In conclusion, it was revealed that the struggles of Korean working mothers were not their personal matters but something caused by contradiction in the societal level. The course of their experience dealing with different kinds of discordance could be regarded as a process of learning and constructing new subjectivity. According to such findings and conclusions, implications for further research was discussed. 참고문헌 (Reference) |
