Socioeconomic Status and Women`s Health: The Impact of Role Conflicts on Women`s Health

Using the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study, this paper examines the impact of socioeconomic status on women`s health. In particular, this study focuses on how playing different roles at home and at work affects women`s physical and psychological health. The use of a panel data set allows avoiding potential bias due to endogeneity between unobservable individual health factors and socioeconomic status variables when estimating the impact of socioeconomic status on health. The empirical results of this paper show that education and employment status are important determinants of women`s health. This paper also illustrates that cohabitation with a marital partner or being a mother do have a significant impact on women`s psychological health, while they have no significant impact on women`s physical health. Moreover, the empirical evidence of this paper suggests that working mothers experience poorer psychological health status, while there is little difference in physical health status between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. This finding implies that conflicts between women`s responsibilities as a mother and those as an employee roles do harm on women`s psychological health.clos