Gendered Trends and Patterns of Attitudes Toward Remarriage Among the Divorced in South Korea

Existing studies from Western contexts have shown that divorced men and women have different views on remarriage, with men being more open to remarriage and women being more opposed to it. However, it is unclear whether these findings can be generalizable in more gender-traditional contexts. More importantly, there is a lack of research on whether and how the gender gap in attitudes toward remarriage has changed over time. This study aims to fill these gaps by exploring trends in the attitudes of divorced men and women toward remarriage over the last two decades in South Korea. Moreover, this study also examines how sociodemographic characteristics are differently associated with remarriage attitudes in divorced men and women. This study utilizes multiple waves of the Social Survey data ranging from 1998 to 2020, provided by the Korean National Statistical Office. Overall, our results support existing findings that divorced men are more open to remarriage than are divorced women. However, we found that remarriage attitudes have converged over time between divorced men and women, mainly driven by the diminishing interest of divorced men in remarriage. Our findings are consistent with recent demographic trends that gender gaps in remarriage rates have decreased in several countries. This study also confirms gendered patterns in associations between sociodemographic factors and remarriage attitudes among the divorced.