Marriage as a legal gateway to care: Legal entitlement and gender inequality in the 2020 and 2025 Korean time use survey

Abstract This article examines caregiving inequality in South Korea through an integrated legal‐empirical analysis of the Korean Time Use Survey (KTUS), constitutional interpretation, and family and labor law architecture. Rather than treating low fertility as a policy failure to be corrected, it approaches demographic decline as an aggregation of private choices, or a structural outcome reflecting how caregiving is legally recognized, institutionally allocated, and culturally mediated. Drawing on repeated cross‐sectional data from the 2019–2020 and 2024–2025 cycles of the KTUS, the article demonstrates that marriage has not functioned as a site of gender‐equal redistribution of care. By enabling longitudinal comparison of daily caregiving practices, the Survey serves as an empirical tool for evaluating whether formally gender‐neutral legal entitlements translate into substantive equality in everyday life. Both cycles of the KTUS show that unpaid care work remains persistently feminized within marriage, while caregivers outside legal marriage are structurally excluded from labor‐law protections. The article further analyzes how Korean family and labor law allocate caregiving entitlements through marriage‐ and lineage‐based definitions derived from the Civil Act. Although labor statutes are framed in gender‐neutral terms, parental and spousal leave operate not according to caregiving function, but through compliance with marital form. This structure presumes that marriage reliably organizes care and internalizes dependency—a presumption that is empirically and doctrinally unsustainable. By tracing the interaction between empirical patterns, constitutional principles of equality and dignity, and labor‐law entitlement design, the article argues that formally gender‐neutral caregiving rights produce substantively unequal outcomes when filtered through marital status, raising a constitutional question about whether the adequacy of marital status as the gateway to care protection may continue.