Abstract
This chapter investigates continuous and discontinuous employment of married women across their life course, using longitudinal data from a nationwide life course survey. Focusing on factors affecting labor force exit and re-entry, it evaluates change and continuity in the gender division of labor and examines the gender revolution theory. The results from descriptive and multivariate event history analyses are summarized as follows: The survival rates of those remaining in the labor force ten years after marriage are stable at around 20% across the birth cohorts born in the 1930s to the 1960s. However, there is a strong tendency for younger cohorts to re-enter the labor force soon after the child-rearing period. Among those who leave the labor force, 40% return to employment within ten years for those born in the 1960s, in contrast to 20% for those born in the 1930s. The younger the cohort, the faster the re-entry, showing a shorter hiatus, and forming the M-shaped employment pattern. About 80% of all re-entrants are employed part-time. The child-rearing period or the need for intensive childcare is a crucial factor affecting labor force exit. Nevertheless, intergenerational co-residence and proximate residence strongly encourage married women to remain in the labor force regardless of patrilocality or matrilocality, whereas those living away from parents are more likely to leave the labor force. High educational attainment also has a positive effect on continuing employment. In particular, university graduates whose husbands also have a university degree are most likely to remain in the labor force, net of other factors. Yet, since this type of couple is least likely to co-reside, the positive effect is canceled out by the negative effect of neolocal residence on continuous employment, resulting in the low and stable continuous employment rate. With respect to labor force re-entry, macro level factors such as labor market conditions and the prevalence of “home–work balance” ideology have positive and crucial impacts on re-entering part-time employment rather than continuing full-time employment. This is the mechanism underlying the M-shaped employment pattern, being inconsistent with the gender revolution theory.
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Notes
- 1.
For details of the survey, see Sect. 2.2 in this book and the website of the National Family Research of Japan. https://nfrj.org/c/english.
- 2.
Such unpaid family workers are regarded as self-employed in the official labor force statistics in Japan. See also footnote 7 in Chap. 1 for the definition.
- 3.
Women who got remarried were excluded from the sample because the information on their first husband was only partially available. The proportion of remarried women is 3.9% of the whole sample. The remarriage rate is low especially for women in Japan.
- 4.
Raymo and Lim (2011) examined married women’s employment in Japan using data from the JPSC conducted in 1993–2002 with hazard models, and presented similar results: relative to high school graduates or less, university graduates were 43% less likely to leave the labor force on the one hand, and they were about 56% less likely to re-enter on the other.
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Kato, A. (2021). Change and Continuity in the Gender Division of Labor. In: The Japanese Family System. SpringerBriefs in Population Studies(). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2113-0_3
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