April 29, 2026
SEOUL – A recent report has found that over 80 percent of employed women with preschool-aged children experience significant shortages of sleep, leisure, and personal time, a condition identified as “time poverty.”
A report published by the Korea Labor Institute released Tuesday indicates that 81.2 percent of dual-income women with children aged under 7 experience time poverty, significantly higher than the 60.3 percent reported for their male counterparts.
Time poverty is defined as a condition in which individuals are unable to obtain sufficient time for sleep or leisure after fulfilling essential responsibilities, including paid employment.
The report analyzed daily schedules by categorizing time into four groups: essential, obligatory, leisure and discretionary.
Households with children devoted substantially more time to obligatory activities, including employment, caregiving, and commuting, compared to households composed solely of couples.
Specifically, households with preschoolers spent an average of 668 minutes per day on obligatory activities.
This figure — over 11 hours — is considerably higher than the 589 minutes reported for households with school-aged children and the 536 minutes for those with adult children.
In contrast, discretionary and leisure time were shortest among households with preschool-aged children.
“When preschool childcare and dual-income employment are combined, the risk of time poverty becomes extremely severe,”Jeong Hyun-sang, a researcher at the Korea Labor Institute, said.
“Institutional measures are needed to expand child care services, reduce caregiving burdens, and address the unequal distribution of unpaid labor within households.”