Abstract
The trend towards dual-income families can be detected in recent years in many industrialized countries. However, despite the continuing rise in Japanese women’s rates of participation in the economy over the period of industrialization and beyond, the notion of gendered division of labour has been seen as “normal” in Japanese society. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the determinants of married women’s labour force participation have changed over the past several decades. Based upon social survey of national sample in Japan conducted in 1985, 1995, 2005, and 2015, we analyse the income provision-role type of the dual-income couples and examine change/stability of the factors that differentiate couples where the husband provides the majority of the couple’s income from equal providers. We find the changing effects of women’s own human capital on contribution to household income. On the other hand, the division of labour within households has not changed a lot over the past several decades.
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Notes
- 1.
Homogamy is defined as marriage of both the husband and wife having similar levels of educational attainment. Hypergamy is when the wife is less educated than the husband, and hypogamy is where the wife is more educated than the husband.
- 2.
Because our primary interest is to understand what factors differentiate equal-provider from male-breadwinner couples, the part with regards to the estimated coefficients affecting the probability to belong to female-breadwinner instead of male-breadwinner couples is not shown in Table 2.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (No. 26380658, No. 17K04103), and (No. 16H02045) as part of the SSP Project. The author thanks both the Social Stratification and Social Mobility Committee for the permission to use the SSM data, and the SSP Project for the permission to use the SSP 2015 survey.
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Nakai, M. (2019). Changes in Couples’ Bread-Winning Patterns and Wife’s Economic Role in Japan from 1985 to 2015. In: Greselin, F., Deldossi, L., Bagnato, L., Vichi, M. (eds) Statistical Learning of Complex Data. CLADAG 2017. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21140-0_14
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