Professional Masculinities

Abstract

In 2007, David McNeill, the Japan/Korea correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education, published two articles about the discrimination experienced by two groups of academic staff within Japanese universities. The first (McNeill 2007a), published in February and titled ‘Still foreign after all these years’, draws on the views of non-Japanese academics to demonstrate ‘how Japanese universities continue to feel unwelcoming to many outsiders’. This article points out that ‘just 5,652 [3.6 percent] of the 158,770 professors employed in Japanese higher education are foreigners on full-time contracts’, and that ‘most of those foreigners work as low-level English language teachers on short-term contracts’. The second article (McNeill 2007b), published in November and titled ‘Few women reach the top in Japan’s universities’, decries the under-representation of women in Japanese higher education, particularly in promotions positions. The article points out that ‘only 16 percent of all faculty positions are held by women — the result, critics say, of long-held notions that a woman’s primary obligation is to home and family. In the United States, women make up 39 percent of full-time faculty’.