表題番号：1998A-917
日付：2002/02/25
研究課題Women's Re-employment and Home life in Japan
| 研究者所属（当時） | 資格 | 氏名 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| （代表者） | アジア太平洋研究センター | 助教授 | ロバーツ・スーザン |
- 研究成果概要
- Thank to the funding provided from the Special Projects Research Fund, I was able to have ten interview tapes from this project transcribed by a student assistant. It took the student assistant longer than planned to finish transcribing the tapes, so analysis is not yet final. But I can tentatively say I found the interviews highly interesting. I came away from these interviews with a strong notion of the difficulties women face when once they leave their regular employment to marry or give birth. Several women mentioned to me that they would not have quit their first jobs had they known how difficult it would be to find another well-paying job in the future. Yet they could not see how they could possibly balance the long hours and fast pace of their jobs with lives as wives and mothers, so they quit. These interviewees were uniformly well-educated and some were in upper-middle income brackets.
Nevertheless, the women interviewed strongly desired to become re-employed, even at part-time menial jobs because they wanted to be out in and contributing to society, and staying home with the children was not sufficiently fulfilling. In fact, two of the women I interviewed had at periods engaged as salespeople of yogurt drinks and put their infants in public daycare to do so, despite high household income. Their husbands were somewhat supportive of their desire to work, although they also worried about how this might affect the children. Most of the men did little of the childcare or household chores during the week, as their long hours on the job prohibited it, but they did quite a lot of weekend family work. The men I spoke with noted they had no objections to their wives taking on equal financial responsibility for the household, but it was unrealistic to expect this since they had already quit their first jobs, and the husband himself could make a much higher income than the wife could ever hope to earn. They felt constrained against putting more time in on household work because their jobs were so demanding of them. One woman noted her husband did not like taking care of his children and was adept at it, but she insisted on it and after time passed, he become much better at handling them. In other words, parenting is learned, not innate. Both men and women looked to the government to provide decent daycare for children and after-school care as well as community programs for children too old for after-school care but not fully self-sufficient. Re-employment and training programs sponsored by the government were also looked upon favorably.
I noted in my proposal I would attend the conference "Work and Family: Today's Realities and Tomorrow's Visions" sponsored by Wellesley College and the Sloan Foundation, and I did. I learned a great deal about how corporations in the United States are creating work/life policies to help their employees integrate their working and personal lives. Such policies include flex-time, telecommuting, reduced hours for regular staff, leaves of absence, compressed work week, various kinds of family leave, job sharing, and child/eldercare referral or assistance. Researchers have found that the biggest problems in implementation of these policies center around work culture where middle managers want workers to be present, and "face-time" is more important than actual productivity. Another problem is that these policies tend to be understood as policies for women, who have the responsibility for household and children. Men are discouraged from making use of them. This further entrenches the gendered division of labor in the United States. I came away from the conference wondering if work/life policies would have helped Japanese women to remain at their career jobs rather than quit and have to deal with the difficulties of the re-employment market.
Results
After the conference, I visited the headquarters of an American multi-national financial services firm that has branches in Japan. This firm is currently implementing work/life policies in its Japanese branches. I obtained permission to study this process and I have also applied to the Citibank Behavioral Sciences Research Council for funding to carry out the pilot project. I will hear in June whether or not I have been successful in this competition.
In March I travelled to Purdue University in Indiana to begin working on a paper with a colleage there who is in Political Science and Women's Studies. She and I collaborated last summer in looking at some day-care initiatives of the Angel Plan, and I am using some of the material from the Special Projects research. The co-authored paper concerns changing notions of gender in Japan and the US, with reference to government policy on family leave and childcare. We will submit this paper to the Social Science Japan Journal of the University of Tokyo later this year.
Last, in January 1999 I gave a talk at Meiji Gakuin University about the Wellesley conference and how I see it fitting into the situation in Japanese workplaces. I remain committed to this line of research inquiry, and plan to continue it.