Conclusion
The 1947 education reform and mass education after the period of high economic growth have greatly influenced women's higher education attainments. These changes are beginning to transform women's views towards education and more women with higher education attainment are entering the labour marker.
However, as previously indicated, many obstacles to equal opportunity and results in the labour market still remain for women. Higher education for women has never had the same social impact as that for men. So far as the academic career of women is regarded as having ‘symbolic value’—it has a close relationship to marriage in Japanese society. Women's higher education is a social way of maintaining a sub-culture and traditional gender norms.
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Ph.D. in education (dissertation: ‘The gender roles of Japanese women’) from the University of California in 1993. At present affiliated to the PHP Research Institute (Japan) as a senior research associate. Areas of interest include comparative higher education, educational policy, and gender and education. Her most recently published works in English are ‘Higher education in partnership with industry: the necessity to employ off-the-job-training system’ in theInternational journal of lifelong education (vol. 12, no. 2, 1994) and ‘The gender roles of Japanese women: an assessment of gender roles of Japanese housewives in the United States’ inPHP research report (vol. 9, 1995).
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Yamada, R. Higher education and gender roles in Japanese society: An assessment of disparity. Prospects 25, 791–802 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02334153
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02334153