午夜剧场

How have women's lifestyles and working styles changed from the Heisei era to the Reiwa era? This book provides an analysis based on the "Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers," which has conducted fixed-point observations for approximately 30 years on 1,500 randomly selected women and younger generations added later. It clarifies what has changed and what has remained the same regarding marriage, childbirth, employment, career formation, housework, childcare, power balance between couples, asset formation, consumption structures, wages, and income inequality. Furthermore, it reveals the economic and social factors, changes in consciousness, and policy effects behind these changes, as well as the challenges that remain.

In the past, unlike other developed countries, the employment rate of female university graduates in Japan was not necessarily high. However, since then, the employment rate of women has generally risen. Particularly in the Heisei era, the number of highly educated women working increased, eventually surpassing the employment rate of female high school graduates.

Looking at the details, many high school graduates would quit their jobs upon marriage or childbirth and later return to work, partly due to the stagnation of their husbands' incomes. However, most of them were part-time or non-regular workers. In contrast, among university graduates, the use of childcare leave systems became widespread, leading to a rapid increase in those continuing to work as full-time employees. Furthermore, although not to the same extent as in Europe and the United States, the number of people utilizing their careers also increased. While these movements matched the advancement of industrial and occupational structures, they also expanded household-level disparities more than individual income disparities.

On the other hand, regarding marriage and childbirth, while many people in lower-income groups used to marry early in the beginning, in recent years, late marriage, non-marriage, and declining birthrates have progressed even further within this group.

What has not changed is the time husbands spend on housework and childcare. Although the number of men performing housework and childcare has increased among the younger generation, the time spent on these tasks remains short, with most of it left to women, and the consciousness of gender-based division of roles remains strong.

This book focuses on generation, education, academic background, and employment status to quantitatively analyze the diversification of Japanese women's life courses. The ability to perform such an analysis is largely due to the panel data that has been continuously collected for about 30 years. If readers can feel the effectiveness of utilizing long-term panel data for this type of analysis, one of the objectives of this book will have been achieved.

Yoshio Higuchi (Co-editor)

午夜剧场 Press

280 pages, 2,420 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and job titles are as of the time of publication.