Gender discrimination in Japanese job- hunting

STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY
Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies
Gender discrimination in Japanese jobhunting
Listening to the voices of future workers
Bachelor thesis in Japanese studies
Spring 2015
Karin Molin
Advisor: Akihiro Ogawa
Table of Contents
Transcription system and translations ................................................................................................... 4 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 4 Shūshokukatsudō ......................................................................................................................................... 5 Sōgōshoku and ippanshoku ....................................................................................................................... 5 2. Aims, research questions and thesis statement ....................................................................... 7 Aims ............................................................................................................................................................... 7 Research questions ..................................................................................................................................... 7 Thesis statement .......................................................................................................................................... 7 3. Method and materials .................................................................................................................. 8 Method .......................................................................................................................................................... 8 Materials ..................................................................................................................................................... 10 4. Previous research and theoretical framework ..................................................................... 10 Previous research ...................................................................................................................................... 10 Gender theory ............................................................................................................................................ 11 5. Joshi nabi (Akemi Ueda’s navigation for girls) ..................................................................... 14 6. DISCO report .............................................................................................................................. 15 7. Working women in Japan ........................................................................................................ 18 8. Presenting the interview survey .............................................................................................. 19 The informants .......................................................................................................................................... 20 Findings ....................................................................................................................................................... 20 Sōgōshoku and ippanshoku ..................................................................................................................... 20 Disadvantaged and advantaged ............................................................................................................. 22 Female representation ............................................................................................................................. 23 Discrimination ........................................................................................................................................... 24 9. Discussion ..................................................................................................................................... 26 Gender-based discrimination – the interviews, the DISCO report and Joshi nabi .................... 26 Sōgōshoku and ippanshoku – keeping status quo ............................................................................... 29 Abe’s womenomics – for the sake of women or for the country? .................................................. 32 10. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 33 11. Summary .................................................................................................................................... 34 2 12. Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 36 Literature .................................................................................................................................................... 36 Articles ........................................................................................................................................................ 36 Internet resources ..................................................................................................................................... 37 13. Appendix .................................................................................................................................... 39 Interview questions about discrimination in shūkatsu ..................................................................... 39 3 Transcription system and translations
In my thesis, I will type out Japanese names with the first name first and surname last. For
transcription, I will use the modified Hepburn Romanization system, with long vowels such
as ā, ē, ō and ū indicated by macrons. A long i will always be written as ii, except for in
loanwords where it will be indicated by a macron. I will also use italic when writing out
words from the Japanese language. All translations from Japanese in this thesis have been
made by me, unless stated otherwise. When using Japanese terminology for the first time, I
will write the original Japanese word in a note.
1. Introduction
Since Prime Minister Shinzō Abe came to power in 2012, he has advocated Abenomics –
economic policies based upon three arrows, created to boost the Japanese economy. The first
arrow is fiscal stimulus, the second is monetary easing and the third is about growth
strategies. The third arrow includes plans to increase the rate of female labor force
participation, such as making day-care centers more available, increasing the rate of female
directors and managers and increasing support for women returning to work after having
children.1 Since Abenomics was introduced, women’s working life has been frequently
discussed. Though Japanese women are being more encouraged than ever to participate in the
labor force, many obstacles like wage differences, gender discrimination and harassment still
exist in Japanese working life, making it difficult for women to live up to these expectations.
Among the OECD countries, Japan has the second largest wage gap between men and women
following South Korea. In the OECD report from 2012, the long working hours in Japanese
companies are pointed out as a main reason why women in Japan are having a hard time
balancing work with household matters.2 In this thesis, I will examine how female university
students, the future working women of Japan, view their job-hunting experience and what
their image of work is like. The main focus of my thesis will be to see if there is any genderbased discrimination in the job-hunting process and what the Japanese women take into
consideration when searching for employment.
1
The website of the Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet/官邸, Josei ga kagayaku nihon e 女性が輝く日本
へ [Towards a Japan where women shine], accessed April 11, 2015, 16:32. http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/headline/women2013.html 2
Report written by The Organisation for Economic Co-­‐operation and Development (OECD), April 2012, accessed April 15, 2015, 11:30. http://www.oecd.org/general/50190707.pdf 4 Shūshokukatsudō
To find employment in Japan, university students do what is called shūshokukatsudō, often
shortened as shūkatsu, literally meaning activity of finding employment.3 Students usually
begin during the end of their third year at university, dressing up in black suits (female
students can choose between either black trousers or a black skirt in their shūkatsu outfit) and
participating in what is called setsumeikai – information sessions where a representative from
human resources presents the company and its ideas to the students. These setsumeikais are
held in the university buildings, in large venues in Japan’s larger cities and also in the
companies’ own buildings. The shūkatsu process differs slightly depending on the company
and the type of occupation, but usually, after participating in the company’s setsumeikai, the
student applies for the job by writing what is called an entry-sheet. If the company accepts the
student’s entry-sheet, the student advances to the next step, usually consisting of different
steps with group interviews, aptitude tests, written examinations and personal interviews.
When I did shūkatsu myself, it struck me as a very strict and uniform process, where
everyone was dressed the same way, doing the exact same kind of procedures. Shūkatsu also
consumes a lot of both time and money, as trips to the company’s head office in Tokyo or
other cities in Japan are often required for interviews. Most of the shūkatsu events held by
companies also take place on weekdays, which means that students are basically required to
skip classes to be able to participate in the job-hunting process.
Sōgōshoku and ippanshoku
As a student doing shūkatsu, you can choose career track when looking for a job. In Japanese
companies there are mainly two types of career tracks – sōgōshoku and ippanshoku.4 They are
both for regular employees, but while the job assignments in the sōgōshoku are wide-ranging
and the employees there are expected to be candidates for higher management positions in the
future, the ippanshoku employee’s work is to assist the sōgōshoku employees in their work,
leaving their chances of promotion and wage increase strictly limited.
This system of dividing work into two career tracks was introduced in Japanese companies
after the enactment of the danjōkoyōkikaikintōhō – the equal employment opportunity law.5
Until 1985, it was common that long term employment was only available for men and
3
就職活動 shūshokukatsudō 総合職 sōgōshoku, 一般職 ippanshoku 5
男女雇用機会均等法 danjōkoyōkikaikintōhō Yumiko Ehara and Masahiro Yamada, Jendā no shakaigaku nyūmon ジェンダーの社会学入門 [Introduction to Gender Sociology] (Tokyo: Iwanami Textbooks, 2008), 99. 4
5 women were expected to do only short time work, leaving female workers rarely promoted.6
To prevent gender-based discrimination and to improve the situation for women on the
Japanese labor market, the equal employment opportunity law was enacted.7 By dividing
work into sōgōshoku and ippanshoku, women who wanted to work on the same conditions as
men could do so in a sōgōshoku job, where they would receive a higher wage, be a part of the
company’s backbone system, be able to expect promotion and raising status, all on the
condition that they would accept job rotation to any city in Japan. On the other hand, women
who did not wish for that kind of work could choose ippanshoku with lower wage, doing only
assisting work, but without the condition of job rotation.8 However, by introducing these
career tracks, companies could more or less keep the power relationships at the workplace
intact – women who had the will and ability were indeed able to work on the same conditions
as men, but the number of women hired for sōgōshoku jobs was still very low, and men
opting for ippanshoku and women opting for sōgōshoku could often be pressured into
changing their career track of choice.9 There were also cases where women were hired for
sōgōshoku jobs only to later receive training and job assignments different from the male
workers’, so that their actual work did not differ much from the work in ippanshoku.10
Furthermore, since taking the responsibility for one’s family while having a sōgōshoku job
was and still is a very difficult task, especially for women who are also expected to be
responsible for child-care and domestic chores, female workers eventually leaving their
sōgōshoku job became a common phenomenon. Sugimoto (2010) explains sōgōshoku in the
following way: “Sōgō shoku women must be willing to work overtime on a regular basis, to
be dispatched to an office distant from their home for a few years […] and to continue work
without interruption during the childrearing phase of their life-cycle.”11 With the high pace
and strict requirements for employees in sōgōshoku, it is no wonder that the rate of female
employees is still low. The images of sōgōshoku and ippanshoku and what they represent will
be brought up in the interview survey chapter, and this practice of dividing work into two
career tracks will be discussed further in the discussion chapter.
6
Ibid., 97. Ibid., 96-­‐97. 8
Ibid., 99. 9
Ibid. 10
Ibid. 11
Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society – Third Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010 (1997)), 167. 7
6 2. Aims, research questions and thesis statement
Aims
For a long time, I have been interested in gender and equality issues, and when deciding the
topic for my thesis I wanted to do something related to that. While studying for a year at
Kyoto University from March 2014 to March 2015, I had also been thinking of searching for
work in Japan. As a woman, I was simply curious to what the situation was like for women on
the Japanese labor market, and therefore I decided to write my thesis about gender
discrimination in job-hunting. Discrimination against women at work in Japan, where women
in many cases are expected to quit when they marry or have children, is a well-known fact
and is seen as a huge problem in Japanese society. As a result, there are many literature works
dealing with sexual harassment or discrimination of women at the workplace. However, when
looking for literature for my thesis about the job-hunting, I realized that there was little to no
literature about gender discrimination in the actual job-hunting process. Still, the job-hunting
is the first step to employment and thus an important part that might be an indicator of what to
expect from the actual work life. It is also the very first step that decides what kind of work
the students are assigned. The fact that there is very little research on this subject only made
me even more certain that my research is valuable. To summarize, the aim of my thesis is to
investigate if there is any gender discrimination in job-hunting in Japan, and if there is, to see
what kind of gender-based discrimination there is. I also want to cover the experience of the
female participants and how they view job-hunting and work life in Japan.
Research questions
The research questions for this thesis are the following:
1) Is there any gender-based discrimination in Japanese job-hunting?
2) If there is any, what kind of gender-based discrimination is there?
3) What aspects do female students take into consideration while doing shūkatsu?
Thesis statement
In this thesis, I will argue that discrimination against women, based on their gender, still
exists in Japanese society and also in the shūkatsu process, and that the introduction of the
career tracks sōgōshoku and ippanshoku in Japanese companies – although making it possible
for women to work in the same way as men – is perpetuating the gender roles on the labor
market and excluding female employees who have children. While the equal employment
7 opportunity law, enacted in 1985, was meant to illegalize gender-based discrimination, it has
proved to be ineffectual, keeping status quo with a more indirect kind of discrimination
against women. I will also argue that although the current politics of Prime Minister Abe is
pushing for women in the workforce, it is refusing to deal with the fundamental issues that are
obstructing women’s advancements to this day. Both the division of career tracks and genderbased discrimination in shūkatsu are rarely brought up when the low labor force participation
rate of women is discussed and are generally not seen as a problem. In my thesis, I will shed
light on these issues and explain why they are obstructing gender equality in Japan.
3. Method and materials
Method
To be able to investigate about gender discrimination in job-hunting in Japan, I needed to
collect data from actual job-hunting students. Rather than a quantitative method such as for
example a questionnaire survey, which can allow you to collect larger amounts of more
shallow data, I wanted to do an interview survey where I met and talked to the informants
face-to-face to be able to come closer and obtain more in-depth data about their personal
experiences. I wanted to examine if gender-based discrimination exists, what the female
students’ thoughts on working life in Japan are and how the students view their experiences
and the job-hunting in general. Thus, I chose the qualitative approach, with an inductive
research method where I first collect data, then analyze it and conclude from the result.
I met my ten informants during the period of a bit more than a month, seeing them in Kyoto,
Osaka and Tokyo, conducting in-depth interviews on seven occasions. The structure I used
for my interview survey was a semi-structured interview format, where I asked all informants
the same questions that I had prepared beforehand, while still leaving some room for
additional questions. I chose this method so that I would be able to ask more about other
things that could be interesting in the particular interview and not be too restrained by the
questions I had prepared.
Initially, I was thinking of interviewing both male and female university students, to be able
to grasp the big picture of the Japanese job-hunting process and to see if there is any genderbased discrimination against men as well. However, I figured that this method might lead to a
broad thesis with too many different sides to consider and I also wanted to focus more on the
issue of working women in Japan. Moreover, the likelihood of Japanese men being
8 structurally gender discriminated being very low, I decided to interview only female
university students and focus on their experiences in job-hunting.
The informants are ten female students from different universities in Japan: one from
Dōshisha University, one from Kyoto University, two from Osaka University, three from
Meiji University and three from Nihon University. As a rule, I tried to do the interviews oneon-one, but on one occasion I interviewed three informants at the same time, and another time
two informants at the same time. This was simply because this was the only time the
informants had time to see me. I was worried that interviewing the informants together would
make them hesitant to answer openly to some questions, but on the contrary I felt as if they
were more relaxed and more talkative while doing the interview together. However, there is
also a risk that they may have influenced each other in other ways when being interviewed
together. Having that said, I think it helped doing the interview survey together, because there
were several times when someone would remember something that she had experienced
herself by listening to the stories of her friends, something that she might not have
remembered if it were only her and me talking. Also, I had the impression that they were
really able to speak freely about their different experiences during the interview sessions. I
conducted all of the interviews in Japanese and except for the very first interview, where I
only took notes, all interviews were audio recorded after receiving the approval of the
informant. The original interview questions in Japanese are found in the appendix.
If I could do my interviews differently, I would have chosen a different time period to
conduct them. I started searching for informants in February, when almost all classes had
ended and many university students who finished shūkatsu had gone traveling to celebrate
their graduation. Consequently, it was hard to find informants who could cooperate and
participate in my interview survey. Even though I received help from the Sociology
department at Kyoto University and had my request circulated in the department’s mailing
list, I did not receive a single reply. If I had chosen a different time period and searched more
on the university grounds or asked my professors to ask for their students’ participation while
they were still having classes, it is highly likely that I could have found more students who
were willing to participate. Also, for most informants more than half a year had passed since
they finished shūkatsu. Because of this, there might be incidents from shūkatsu that they had
forgotten by the time I spoke to them.
The method I used in addition to qualitative in-depth interviews was participant observation,
seeing as I did shūkatsu myself during my time in Japan. I participated in four shūkatsu
events; one aimed at Japanese students held at Kyoto University with smaller companies
9 based in Kyoto, Mynavi’s big Global Career EXPO 2014 in Tokyo aimed at global and
bilingual people, Universal Job Fair in Kyoto aimed at bilinguals and foreign students and an
event aimed at only foreign students held by Top Career in Tokyo.12
Materials
To be able to obtain a fuller picture of shūkatsu, I also viewed and analyzed different articles
and reports. To learn about the situation for female students searching for employment, I
looked at the special feature Shūkatsu ON! published in Yomiuri Shimbun every Tuesday. I
went through all articles from the time period between May 2013 and October 2014, ending
up analyzing mainly the corner Ueda Akemi no joshi nabi (translated as Akemi Ueda’s
navigation for girls, hereafter referred to as Joshi nabi), which was clearly connected to the
topic of this thesis. In the corner Joshi nabi, career consultant Akemi Ueda replies to the
worries of female students and gives advice regarding shūkatsu. By doing so, I figured that I
would be able to grasp the picture of the women’s shūkatsu and what problems female
students might encounter during it. In addition, I also read a report conducted by the global
recruiting company DISCO. The report presented the results of an Internet questionnaire
survey conducted in March 2013 by the same company, examining the experiences of 196
Japanese female students who had finished shūkatsu. For information on what the present
condition for working women in Japan is like, I read The Sociology of Child-care and Work
by Junko Nishimura and also looked into An Introduction to Japanese Society by Yoshio
Sugimoto.
4. Previous research and theoretical framework
Previous research
When it comes to the topic of gender discrimination in the working life, there are several
works, and there is also some information about discrimination based on academic
background. However, research on gender discrimination in the job-hunting process is very
scarce. In her junior college graduation thesis Women Studies on Support System of Career
Designing – In Order to Keep Women’s Life Balance, Masumi Tsubaki describes how female
12
The website of Mynavi, Job Fair for Global and Bilingual People, accessed April 25, 2015, 14:39. http://global.mynavi.jp/ The website of Universal Job Fair, Universal Job Fair & Party 2015 3.6 Fri, accessed May 8, 2015, 18:13. https://www.worldstage.jp/ujf2015.html The website of Top Career, Kigyō seminā /Shūshoku ibento jōhō 企業セミナー ／ 就職イベント 情報 [Information on company seminars and employment events], accessed May 15, 2015, 11:38. http://www.topcareer.jp/2016/event/detail.html?event_id=0002 10 junior college students view work, marriage and work-life balance.13 The job-hunting process
and the women’s experiences of it is however not the focus of this thesis. A work worth
mentioning is the doctoral dissertation Perception and behavior of female university students
regarding employment by Shangbo Li. However, since I was unable to obtain this book from
Sweden and the contents cannot be found online, I could not use it as a reference.
Nevertheless, I believe the lack of previous research on this topic proves that it is a topic
worth researching.
In order to put my research in a sociological context, I will also refer to the works An
Introduction to Japanese Society by Yoshio Sugimoto and The Sociology of Child-care and
Work by Junko Nishimura, as they deal with the working life of Japanese women. In addition,
I will also refer to the book Introduction to Gender Sociology written by Yumiko Ehara and
Masahiro Yamada, since they do not only write about gender theory, but also about the
Japanese housewife model, working women and the view on child-care and parenthood in
Japan. These three works may not be specifically examining the job-hunting process of
Japanese women, but they will provide background information that is crucial in
understanding the current situation on the Japanese labor market.
Gender theory
With the topic of my thesis being gender discrimination, I thought it was only natural to
choose gender theory as the tool to analyze the contents of my interviews and other
documents having to do with the shūkatsu of female students in Japan. In gender theory,
where gender is seen as a social construction, much attention is given to the gender roles and
the expectations that follow them. For women searching employment in Japan, the gender
roles and the expectations of women in the Japanese society are something that they must
relate to. To introduce gender theory and explain the Japanese gender roles, I will do a short
review of the relevant chapters from the book Introduction to Gender Sociology, written by
Yumiko Ehara and Masahiro Yamada.
In the third chapter of Introduction to Gender Sociology, Ehara discusses what makes a
woman womanly by presenting traits that are culturally viewed as traditionally womanly and
13
Masumi Tsubaki, Tandaisei no kyaria dezain ni kansuru shienkatsudō: josei no raifu baransu o sasaeru tame ni 短大生のキャリア・デザインに関する支援活動：女性のライフ・バランスを支えるために (Women Studies on Support System of Career Designing – In Order to Keep Women’s Life Balance), (Junior college graduation thesis, Ichinomiya Women's Junior College, 2006). http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110006391967/en 11 manly.14 In the fourth chapter, Yamada continues to discuss what makes a man manly.15 Ehara
writes that the traits that are assigned to women have less to do with what women are really
like, and more to do with the norm of femininity and the image of what the ideal woman
should be like.16 Yamada summarizes it by saying that masculinity is self-actualization, which
means economical responsibility for one’s family, and that femininity is affection, which
means responsibility over childrearing and to support one’s husband.17
In the fifth chapter, Yamada explains the historical background of the male
breadwinner/female housewife model. The housewife emerged in modern society, from the
end of the Second World War until the 1970’s, when Japan experienced a period of rapid
economical growth. The wages for working men kept rising in the bubble economy, which
made the housewife model economically compatible.18 Yamada points out that when the
bubble finally burst in the 1990’s, the wages of the husbands could not continue to rise and
the number of part-time working housewives increased.19 With the Japanese economy
declining, the number of married couples who could afford to keep the male
breadwinner/female housewife model decreased, leaving the women to shoulder both
housework and a job. After the peak of the full-time housewife model in 1975, the rate of
unmarried women started to increase, resulting in the declining birth rates which is one of the
major challenges that the Japanese society face today.20 Yamada states that nowadays, the
dream of living as a full-time housewife is becoming impossible to realize for many women.21
However, even though couples where both man and woman work are increasing, women still
have the double burden of both work and housework. The total amount of time men spend on
housework is very low, and it is still very common that companies do not approve of the
employees working while taking care of a child.22 Yamada cites the Japanese housewife as an
example of a symbol of the gender roles in Japanese society, where the husband works
outside of the home and the wife does housework and child-care inside the home.23 Yamada
claims that the purpose of the gender roles of a married couple is not only to simply divide the
14
Ehara, Onna to wa nani ka 「女」とは何か [What is a woman?], in Introduction to Gender Sociology, written by Yumiko Ehara and Masahiro Yamada, (Tokyo: Iwanami Textbooks, 2008), 20-­‐28. 15
Yamada, Otoko to wa nani ka 「男」とは何か [What is a man?], in Introduction to Gender Sociology, written by Yumiko Ehara and Masahiro Yamada, (Tokyo: Iwanami Textbooks, 2008), 30-­‐38. 16
Ehara and Yamada, Introduction to Gender Sociology, 24. 17
Ibid., 36. 18
Ibid., 47. 19
Ibid. 20
Ibid., 53. 21
Ibid., 54. 22
Ibid., 55. 23
Ibid., 42. 12 work and duties between them, but also to help build their identities as man and woman.24
Yamada argues that even if a woman cannot work, it will not affect her in her identity as a
woman, and similarly, a man who cannot do housework will not have his identity as a man
damaged because of it.25
In chapter eight, Ehara tackles the gender issues in childrearing. Ehara writes that child-care
did not become the main responsibility of the woman until the period of rapid economical
growth.26 Before this period, it was common to live together with one’s parents even after
marriage, but due to modernization it became common for married couples with children to
live separately, with the husband leaving the home for work for long hours.27 As yet another
reason to why the responsibility falls upon the mother, Ehara refers to the common idea of the
motherhood myth – that since women have maternal instincts, it is only natural that they are
assigned child-care.28 She also refers to the three-year-old child myth, which says that if
women do not take care of their children full-time until the age of three, it will damage the
child’s mental development and its character building.29 Ehara says that it is a very firmly
rooted belief, referring to a survey made in 1999 targeted at mothers with children of ages up
to eight. Around 74 percent of the mothers replied The mother should raise the child until it is
three years old, while almost 26 percent replied As long as the child is raised with love, it
does not necessarily have to be the mother. In addition, as to why almost only women take
child-care leave even though both men and women are able to do so by the child-care leave
law, Ehara points to the insufficient understanding from the companies. At the work place, the
company can divide job assignments for men and women, making the position of the woman
more substitutable than the position of the man. This leads to men being unable to take childcare leave in reality, since their existence is indispensable. She summarizes the gender
problem: “For women it is only natural to raise children, not doing it means disqualification
as a mother. For men it is natural not to raise children, and doing so is not manly.”30
The picture of the Japanese gender roles emerging in the work of Ehara and Yamada is a
very strict one, and my impression after spending two years and three months in total in the
country is very similar to it. When talking to female Japanese friends about child-care, I have
often been told that it is important to take care of the child at least until the child is three years
24
Ibid., 45. Ibid., 44. 26
Ibid., 82. 27
Ibid., 83. 28
母性神話 bosei shinwa 29
三歳児神話 sansaiji shinwa 30
Ehara and Yamada, Introduction to Gender Sociology, 82-­‐91. 25
13 old or until entering elementary school, which indicates that myths about child-care are also
common belief among the young women today. Moreover, even though the number of fulltime housewives is decreasing, the social systems in Japan often support their existence,
creating further obstacles for working women.
5. Joshi nabi (Akemi Ueda’s navigation for girls)
In the column Joshi nabi, from the special feature Shūkatsu ON! in Yomiuri Shimbun, career
consultant Akemi Ueda and other contributors write about the worries of female students and
give advice regarding their shūkatsu. I have selected examples from this corner that can help
forming an image of what shūkatsu for women is like. Akemi Ueda states on several
occasions that shūkatsu for female students tend to be more of a drawn-out contest31 than for
men. One reason is that men tend to be prioritized in the screening process for major
companies and that the screening for medium-sized enterprises, smaller enterprises and
ippanshoku, where women are often employed to a higher extent, starts later during the year.
Due to the prolonged screening process, it is common that the rejection e-mails pile up,
leading to a loss of confidence, Ueda says.32 In another article, female students are
encouraged to also look at sōgōshoku jobs in medium-sized companies. The reason given is
that since the ratio of women who are hired for sōgōshoku jobs in big companies is still very
low, it might be wise to try for ippanshoku jobs or for sōgōshoku jobs in medium-sized
companies.33 In addition, it is also stated in the column that the number of invitations to
individual interviews is lower compared to the men and that is a fact that women are
disadvantaged. Furthermore, it is also said that since the government is planning to increase
the rate of women in management positions to 30 percent by the year of 2020, the chances for
young women will increase from now on. As advice, female students are encouraged to look
at the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare’s list of awarded companies, where companies
that actively make the most of the women’s’ abilities and support women who are both
working and taking care of their children can be found.34
Touching on the subject of the housewife in another article, the column says that in the past,
women did have the option of becoming a housewife – however, times are changing and with
31
長期戦 chōkisen Ueda Akemi no shin joshi nabi 上田晶美の新女子ナビ [Akemi Ueda’s new navigation for girls], Shūkatsu ON!, Yomiuri Shimbun, July 8, 2014. 33
Ibid., May 13, 2014. 34
Ibid., April 15, 2014. 32
14 the ratio of unmarried persons increasing, it is a very unrealistic option today.35 Regarding
marriage and job rotation, the column writes about a message from a female science student:
“I received a job offer for a technological sales job, but since there are job rotations every
third year I’m wavering. Will I be able to continue working even after marriage and child
birth?” When the career consultant asked her if she had a marriage partner, it seemed that she
did not. The career consultant writes that it seems to be the case that women, when thinking
of their future life events such as marriage, become worried and think twice about entering the
company.36 Similarly, in the column from March 2 in 2013, another career consultant writes
that there often are questions such as: “Since I want to work for a long period of time, I want
to join a company where I can take maternity leave. How should I choose?” Whereas boys
focus on the occupation and job assignments, girls must overlook their life when they search
employment and take the possibility of marriage, childbirth and child-care into
consideration.37
Reading Ueda’s column, the impression of the shūkatsu of female students can be
summarized in three points. The first point is that women are disadvantaged in the screening
process for sōgōshoku, especially in major companies, as well as when it comes to the number
of job offers and invitations to individual interviews. The second point is that the times are
changing, making the housewife model an unrealistic choice, and new political strategies will
increase the chances to employment for women. The third point is that it is very common that
women still must take a future marriage or childbirth into consideration when searching for
employment.
6. DISCO report
In an Internet questionnaire survey conducted in March 2013 by DISCO, a company dealing
with global recruitment, the experiences of 196 Japanese female students who have finished
shūkatsu were examined.38 Whereas nearly all male students choose sōgōshoku as their career
track of choice, the number for the female students opting for sōgōshoku was 63 percent.39 19
percent opted for eria sōgōshoku, a career track similar to sōgōshoku but without any job
35
Ueda Akemi no joshi nabi 上田晶美の新女子ナビ[Akemi Ueda’s navigation for girls], Shūkatsu ON!, Yomiuri Shimbun, August 6, 2013. 36
Ibid., June 4, 2013. 37
Ibid., April 2, 2013. 38
Report written by DISCO, Joshigakusei no shūshokukatsudō ankēto kekka 「女子学生の就職活動アンケー
ト」結果 [The results of the questionnaire survey regarding the shūshokukatsudō of female students], accessed April 12, 2015, 22:47, 1. http://www.disc.co.jp/uploads/2013/06/201303fs.pdf 39
Ibid., 2. 15 transfers, 13 percent wanted ippanshoku and 5 percent went for the option Others.40 As a
reason to why she had chosen eria sōgōshoku, one student said that it was because she
thought that even if she got married or had children, she would be able to continue working
without overdoing it.41 As to why she had chosen ippanshoku, another student said that since
there is the possibility of a job transfer in sōgōshoku, it is difficult to plan her life, and yet
another student said that if it’s ippanshoku, she thought that she would be able to continue to
work even after getting married.42
When asked about their expected length of service after entering the company, as many as
64 percent replied Until retirement (as long as possible).43 16 percent answered At least for
three years, 12 percent answered Until childbirth, 6 percent said Until I get married and 2
percent replied At least for one year.44 The authors of the report state:
According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the job separation rate
within three years is 34,7 percent for female university graduates (2009 year’s
graduates). However, from what can be seen from these numbers, students
thinking of leaving the job at an early stage do not seem to be that many.45
Similarly, although there are many cases of women leaving their job after having a child,
there are only 12 percent who are consciously planning this, saying that they only wish to
continue their work until childbirth.46 This could be indicating that there are women who have
to leave work when they have had a child, in spite of their original intention to stay at their
workplace for as long as they can. However, since these are very recent numbers, it might
also be the case that times are changing and that the percentage of women leaving work after
childbirth will decrease in the future.
When looking into the companies, what the female students first paid most attention to was
the actual condition of overtime work and working on a day off (63 percent).47 The second
was the acquisition rate of child-care leave (57 percent), and the third was the average number
of working years for female employees (48 percent).48 For the women who had chosen to look
for sōgōshoku jobs, the interest in the acquisition rate of child-care leave was even higher,
40
Ibid. Ibid., 3. 42
Ibid. 43
Ibid., 4. 44
Ibid. 45
Ibid. 46
Ibid. 47
Ibid. 48
Ibid. 41
16 amounting to 60 percent paying attention to this point, compared to 52 percent for the women
looking for eria sōgōshoku or ippanshoku jobs.49 Although it is a slight difference, this could
indicate that especially women in sōgōshoku feel as if it would be hard to combine their
career with family life and therefore are more anxious to make sure that they will be able to
take maternity leave.
When asked if they during shūkatsu had thought they were lucky to be a woman, 41 percent
replied that they had, while 59 percent replied that they had not.50 Those who replied that they
had thought they were lucky to be a woman during shūkatsu gave reasons such as there being
more alternatives for women (sōgōshoku, eria sōgōshoku and ippanshoku) to choose
between.51 Another reason was that when having a hard time getting a job offer, the pressure
from family and others is much lower than it is for men.52 The same respondent also said that
because of marriage and child-care, there are more socially accepted ways for a woman to live
than there are for men.53 Another woman said that in the employment process it is a
disadvantage to be a woman, but once you are hired you receive quite a favorable treatment.54
When asked if they had felt disadvantaged as a woman during shūkatsu, 50 percent
answered that they had and 50 percent answered that they had not.55 The reasons for feeling
disadvantaged was being thought to quit work soon, the difficulty of receiving a job offer in
sōgōshoku and that it was tiresome to be frequently asked about what you would do after
getting married or having children.56 One respondent said that an interviewer had told her that
since she is a woman, ippanshoku, like work at a call center, would suit her better than
sōgōshoku. She said that she felt that she was being looked down upon.57 Another respondent
said that it was because when thinking about one’s life plan, she felt that it was more likely
that marriage or child-care affects the work of the woman.58 There was also a respondent who
said that when she was looking for a sōgōshoku job for a company she really liked, she was
told that there are job transfers even if she got married and was asked if she was really okay
with that, which made her feel as if she was being questioned.59 Another respondent said that
she had felt disadvantaged when she had been asked what she thought about women serving
49
Ibid. Ibid., 5. 51
Ibid. 52
Ibid. 53
Ibid. 54
Ibid. 55
Ibid. 56
Ibid. 57
Ibid. 58
Ibid. 59
Ibid. 50
17 tea (at work) when she attended an interview for a technical job and yet another respondent
said that when she attended an interview for a job in the manufacturing industry, she was met
with glances implying that it was impossible for a woman.60
7. Working women in Japan
In The Sociology of Child-care and Work, Nishimura states that there are times when she is
told that Japanese women have started working, that they are making social progress and
getting ahead in society. With the sub-title of her work being Has the way of working changed
for women?, she examines to what extent these statements are true, and to what extent they
are not.61
Many Japanese women experience marriage, childbirth and childrearing during the period
of age twenty to the mid-thirties. When looking at graphs over the employment rate for
women in Japan, the graph takes the shape of the letter M, with the line dropping right during
that period of time. In most western countries, this kind of graph does not exist – Nishimura
writes that there are even countries like Sweden and the United States where there is no
decline in female workforce participation rate at all during the same time period.62 Even
though the rate of decrease has become less strong the past forty years, Nishimura says that it
does not necessarily mean that young women are working to a greater extent than the women
before them – the changes might also be the effect of the trend towards late marriage and the
increasing numbers of women not getting married at all.63 In order to achieve a more detailed
picture, Nishimura says that it is necessary to examine what kind of women are working and
in what way they are working.64
In her work, Nishimura finds that the percentage of women in employment by the time of
marriage is indeed increasing the younger the generation – from under 50 percent for women
born in the 1940’s to around 70 percent for women born in the 1970’s.65 However, when
examining the numbers more carefully and looking into what kind of employment women
born in the 1960’s and 1970’s have during the periods One year before marriage, By the time
of marriage and One year after marriage, it is clear that the numbers for women in regular
60
Ibid. Junko Nishimura, Kosodate to shigoto no shakaigaku 子育てと仕事の社会学 [The Sociology of Child-­‐care and Work], (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 2014), 8. 62
Ibid., 15. 63
Ibid., 19. 64
Ibid., 20. 65
Ibid., 25. 61
18 employment by the time of marriage and one year after marriage have barely changed – 45.3
percent of the women born in the 1960’s were in regular employment by the time of marriage,
whereas the number for women born in the 1970’s is 45.4 percent.66 Regarding the period
One year after marriage, 27.8 percent of the women born in the 1960’s were in regular
employment at that time, while the number for the women born in the 1970’s was 29.4
percent. Thus, there has been only a minor change between these age groups.67 Consequently,
Nishimura argues that the increased number of working women is not due to the number of
women in regular employment increasing, but rather because the number of women in
irregular employment, such as part-time jobs or dispatch jobs, has increased.68 Nishimura
continues, stating that when examining the continuation of employment, the rate of female
workers who continued regular employment from the time of marriage until after marriage, it
is in total 25-30 percent for the cohort of women born in the 1970’s, which is not very high.
Similarly, among the women born in the period from the 1950’s to the 1970’s, a little more
than half of the women who were in regular employment the year before marriage did not
continue their regular employment the year after their marriage.69
8. Presenting the interview survey
As stated earlier in the Method and materials chapter, the informants are ten female students
from different universities in Japan. All of them were in their fourth year in university, the
majority of them going to start work after the end of the semester. In the interview survey,
there were nine questions decided beforehand. During the very first interview, one more was
added, and all in all the questions were the following:
1. When did you begin shūkatsu?
2. What kind of companies were you looking at?
3. What were your thoughts regarding sōgōshoku and ippanshoku?
4. In shūkatsu, what kind of points did you put a great value on while looking at companies?
5. Could you tell me about your experiences of the job interviews? How did you feel about it?
6. Doing shūkatsu, as a woman, was there anything in particular that you were keeping in
mind?
66
Ibid., 27. Ibid. 68
Ibid., 29. 69
Ibid. 67
19 7. In shūkatsu, was there anything you felt was discriminating?
8. What are your thoughts about work in the future?
9. (To those who finished shūkatsu) In the end, what was the reason you chose the company
you will work for?
10. When you were a child, how did your parents deal with work and child-care?
Since it was a semi-structured interview, there were some attendant questions as well, in some
interviews more than in others, but most of the questions were the same and asked to all of the
informants. Before the interview, I tried my best to bond and to talk a bit about myself to
make it easier for them to talk about themselves later in the interview.
The informants
To protect the anonymity of the informants, I will use pseudonyms instead of their real
names. The informants who participated in the interview survey are the following:
1) Nanako, Dōshisha University, Department of Letters. Interviewed February 20, 2015.
2) Shizuka, Kyoto University, Faculty of Law. Interviewed February 23, 2015.
3) Saori, Osaka University, Faculty of Foreign Languages. Interviewed March 3, 2015.
4) Mayumi, Meiji University, School of Global Japanese Studies. Interviewed March 9, 2015.
5) Maiko, Meiji University, School of Global Japanese Studies. Interviewed March 9, 2015.
6) Haruna, Meiji University, School of Global Japanese Studies. Interviewed March 9, 2015.
7) Kaori, Nihon University, Department of Economics. Interviewed March 12, 2015.
8) Yuki, Nihon University, Department of Economics. Interviewed March 13, 2015.
9) Sayaka, Nihon University, Department of Economics. Interviewed March 13, 2015.
10) Satomi, Osaka University, Department of Economics. Interviewed March 18, 2015.
Findings
During the interview process, I had many interesting conversations with the informants about
a wide range of topics. I have selected the subjects that are the most relevant to my thesis and
will present the results divided into four themes: Sōgōshoku and ippanshoku, Disadvantaged
and advantaged, Female representation and Discrimination.
Sōgōshoku and ippanshoku
All four students from Kyoto University, Dōshisha University and Osaka University that I
talked to were looking only at sōgōshoku while applying for jobs. Satomi from Osaka
20 University expressed it in the following way: “When you graduate from a national university,
there’s this pride, or how to put it… I wanted to work and make money.”70 All four of them
said they wanted to do more difficult work or do work with more varied job assignments than
in ippanshoku. The wage was also a reason why they had chosen to only consider sōgōshoku
as an option. Saori from Osaka University said: “To be honest, the wages in sōgōshoku and
ippanshoku are completely different.”71 In total, only three students told me they also looked
for ippanshoku jobs – Haruna, Kaori and Sayaka. Haruna from Meiji University said that she
looked at ippanshoku because she had heard that it was easier to be accepted there than in
sōgōshoku.72 Kaori and Sayaka from Nihon University also took ippanshoku into
consideration when looking for employment and Sayaka said she felt she was more suited for
ippanshoku than for sōgōshoku.73 When speaking with the students who had also looked for
ippanshoku jobs, their answers to the question about what they, as women, were keeping in
mind during shūkatsu differed from the students who were only looking at sōgōshoku jobs.
Kaori from Nihon University told me that she focused a lot on her smile, saying that:
Maybe they also put emphasis on my abilities, but I thought that they value
cheerfulness or that kind of outward appearance, in Japan. That’s why I was
really careful about my personal appearance, making my hair, doing my make-up
properly, also the way I sit down. They pay more attention to those things [when it
comes to women].74
Sayaka from Nihon University also said that in ippanshoku, the companies focused on
completely different things than in sōgōshoku jobs. She said there were many girls with a soft
atmosphere looking for ippanshoku jobs, whereas what was valued highly in sōgōshoku was a
burning desire for something.75 Sayaka continued, saying that she had asked for the opinions
of male workers about what kind of person they would like to work in ippanshoku at their
workplace:
As I thought they said things like ‘soothing’ and a burning desire for something
was not needed at all. I realized that they wanted things like a soft atmosphere,
70
Satomi. Interviewed March 18, 2015, Osaka. Saori. Interviewed March 3, 2015, Osaka. 72
Haruna. Interviewed March 9, 2015, Tokyo. 73
Kaori. Interviewed March 12, 2015, Tokyo. Sayaka. Interviewed March 13, 2015, Tokyo. 74
Kaori. 75
ガツガツさ gatsugatsusa. Sayaka. 71
21 thoughtfulness, and since I thought that I could do it, I was very conscious of my
devotedness, as a woman.76
She also said that she was very careful of her way of speaking and tried to speak more slowly
than usual.77 Kaori also said: “It’s a kind of weird story, but I was told by my senior that girls
should absolutely wear a skirt. I was also told to shorten the skirt I had, but I didn’t.”78 That
it is easier to find employment when you wear a skirt seemed to be common knowledge in
shūkatsu. When I conducted the interviews and explained that the topic of my thesis was
gender-based discrimination, it occurred several times that the students responded by saying:
“Oh, like that it’s easier to get a job if you wear a skirt?” Although this seems to apply to
women in both sōgōshoku and ippanshoku, the only students who talked about actively
paying attention to details regarding appearance and physical attributes were the students
looking at ippanshoku jobs.
Disadvantaged and advantaged
Four students, Nanako from Dōshisha University, Saori from Osaka University, Kaori from
Nihon University and Yuki from Nihon University, all said that they felt that they had to put
more effort than male students into showing that they will really work hard. Because they are
women, they are thought to be more likely to quit and therefore feel the need to show that
they will not, despite their gender. Nanako explained that:
In Japan, if a woman doesn’t say that she wants to do it, they probably won’t let her do
it. So, I thought that I should assert myself more. For example, if a man with the same
abilities as me is there, I will be expected to quit when having a baby so if I don’t assert
myself, they will choose the man [for the job].79
When I asked Saori what she was keeping in mind as a woman during shūkatsu, she said that
she made sure to tell the interviewers that she is tough, since “if I’m thought to quit, that’s the
end of it”.80 Kaori said that she kept in mind not to lose to the men and when I asked her in
what way she meant, she said: “Like in the aspect of ability. I tried to appeal by saying that
even though I’m a girl I studied properly, and I will work really hard. Girls might get married
and quit, but I’m not like that.”81 Yuki told me that when looking at sōgōshoku jobs, there was
76
Ibid. Ibid. 78
Kaori. 79
Nanako. Interviewed, February 20, 2015, Kyoto. 80
Saori. 81
Kaori. 77
22 an atmosphere of many employees questioning her going to work in sōgōshoku because of her
gender. Even so, she put effort into appealing that she would work and that she would not
mind being stationed anywhere in Japan.82 These examples all show that the female students
feel that they are disadvantaged compared to the male students and that they are actively
trying to overcome that issue when doing shūkatsu, working against prejudices based on their
gender.
However, there were some students who said that they could take advantage of these low
expectations on women. Mayumi from Meiji University said: “Questions like ’can you do it,
even though you’re a girl?’ will come up, so if I say ’I can do it!!’ I will pass the job
interview. On that point I felt that I had an advantage, turning the tables on the boys.”83
Similarly, Yuki stated: “I think that girls can take more advantage of that, more than boys.
They can say ’I’m a girl but I can work hard’, but they can also say ’I’m a girl so I’m more
suitable for ippanshoku’. I think they can adapt more.”84 Whether the students can take
advantage of these low expectations or not, these accounts confirm that the image of the
female students is one with very low expectations. The female students also seem to be well
aware of that they are not expected to wanting to work hard because of their gender.
Female representation
When asked about if they experienced anything discriminative during their shūkatsu, both
Nanako and Satomi said that when looking at the sex ratio of the company’s employees, they
felt that the low numbers of female employees could be a sign of discrimination.85 Satomi
also pointed out that almost all of the seniors invited to job events to talk about work were
men and that female participants in that role were very few. Similarly, when asked about
discrimination, Sayaka from Nihon University said that since the interviewers generally were
men, they were looking from the point of view of men and thinking that women were not
really up for the task. Thus, when Sayaka was applying for sōgōshoku jobs, the interviewers
often showed very high interest in why she had chosen to look at sōgōshoku jobs.86 Yuki said
that she met both male and female interviewers, but that she felt that male students and male
interviewers often were on the same wavelength and got excited, and that it was the same for
82
Yuki. Interviewed March 13, 2015, Tokyo. Mayumi. Interviewed March 9, 2015, Tokyo. 84
Yuki. 85
Nanako and Satomi. 86
Sayaka. 83
23 her when she met female interviewers.87 Haruna also said that all of the interviewers she had
met were men.88
Discrimination
When I asked about discrimination in shūkatsu, several students mentioned the lack of female
representation among interviewers and students at shūkatsu guidance events as a problem.
Almost all students also replied that they had not experienced any discrimination. However,
when I asked Satomi about her experience of the job interviews, she told me that the company
where she found employment had more interviews for the female students than for the male
students. Since she was hired, she met the other students hired by the same company and
when talking to the male students, she learned that the number of interviews was different –
three occasions for male students and five occasions for female students. As an explanation,
Satomi said: “It was a company in the finance business so transfers are very common, that’s
why they were careful in choosing their employees. It’s because women are thought to quit.”89
Shizuka from Kyoto University told me, although telling me that it was only something she
had heard of, about a Japanese company dealing with consulting and venture capital. Two or
three years ago, the company president had told a girl who showed up at an interview:
“You’re pretty bold to come here with that face.”90 Shizuka said that it is not something that
boys would be told.91 Having less to do with discrimination, Shizuka also told me of some
differences between what male and female students consider while doing shūkatsu. According
to what Shizuka had heard listening to students around her doing shūkatsu, the female
students considered their boyfriends’ future plans to a much higher degree than male students
did about their female partners’ plans. She said:
For the male students, it really doesn’t matter if they might be able to start a
family. Regardless of their chance of being able to start a family being 0 percent
or 100 percent, they think ‘First of all, work!’, ‘How am I going to do’ or ‘I want
money’. […] The female students who have a partner try to choose their place to
work after their partner, and even when they don’t have a partner they think a lot
about ‘How about childbirth’ and ‘I really wouldn’t like it if I would have to quit
work’ and so on.92
87
Yuki. Haruna. 89
Satomi. 90
その顔でよく受けに来たな。Sono kao de yoku uke ni kita na. 91
Shizuka. Interviewed February 23, 2015, Kyoto. 92
Ibid. 88
24 When I talked to the students from Meiji University and Nihon University, although they
answered that they had not experienced any discrimination, they had very concrete examples
of gender-specified comments from interviewers in their shūkatsu experience. Mayumi from
Meiji University said that at one interview at a distribution company, she was told: “When you
get married and have children, you’re going to quit, right!”93 Maiko from Meiji University
said that she had talked to a male student also doing shūkatsu. He had said: “Why are you
trying to get this job which is hard to get? As a woman, if you just find a job somewhere,
you’ll get married later so where you work doesn’t really matter, right!”94 When Haruna went
to interviews for a railway company, she said that she noticed that railway companies were
really a man’s society and that she was looked upon as if they were thinking: “You’re a
woman, can you do this?”95 Mayumi also told me about that in banks, there is also a career
track in addition to sōgōshoku and ippanshoku, called tokutei sōgōshoku.96 Tokutei sōgōshoku
is something in between sōgōshoku and ippanshoku, for women who want to have a career
but who do not want to transfer. When asked about what they think about the way of
separating career tracks into sōgōshoku, ippanshoku and tokutei sōgōshoku, Maiko said: “If
you’re a woman, I feel as if they’re saying that tokutei sōgōshoku is better than sōgōshoku. If
you go for sōgōshoku, it feels like they’re saying ’So you’re not going to get married?’. It’s
difficult to choose.”97 Haruna added: “It’s like you are made to choose between work or
marriage at that moment.” Maiko said: “If you enter sōgōshoku, I wonder if it will be difficult
to stay if you get married.”98 Haruna said that when looking at sōgōshoku jobs, there were a
lot of companies preferring boys, asking her things like: “What will you do if you get
married? Do you think you can continue working?”99 She was also asked things like: “It’s so
busy that you will have to sacrifice your private life, are you really sure about this? Do you
really want to do this work?”100
Yuki said that when looking at sōgōshoku jobs, she was often told: “Even though you’re a
woman, are you okay with it?”101 In addition, since she had been living with her parents all
her life, she was asked at one interview: “Your father and mother, your family, are they okay
93
Mayumi. Maiko. Interviewed March 9, 2015, Tokyo. 95
Haruna. 96
特定総合職 tokutei sōgōshoku (tokutei meaning specific) 97
Maiko. 98
Maiko and Haruna. 99
Haruna. 100
Ibid. 101
Yuki. 94
25 with it?”102 Overall, this and the above-mentioned examples show a lack of belief in the
abilities and independence of women and low expectations from the interviewers, thinking
either that women lack abilities suitable for the job because of their gender or that they will
get married and quit anyway.
Although the above-mentioned students had been asked questions specifically based on
expectations having to do with their gender and future family responsibilities in their job
interviews, when asked about if they had experienced anything discriminative in their
shūkatsu, almost all of them said that they had not. The only one who reflected further was
Maiko, who said: “Whatever I was told, even if I was told ‘Can you really do it even though
you’re a girl?’, I didn’t think any of it was discriminative. Now that I’m doing this interview
like this, I start to think ’Oh?’ about some things.”103 It seems as if the students believe being
asked this kind of questions is only natural. It might also be the case that the informants have
different definitions for discrimination. Since many of the students thought that it was only
natural to be asked about marriage, be expected to quit in the future and to be viewed with
low expectations, they might not be thinking of these questions as discriminating. This could
mean that more accounts of unfair treatment might have been lost, as the informants would
not see them as relevant when talking about discrimination.
9. Discussion
In this discussion section, I will discuss three subjects I found relevant in my research, as
previously mentioned in my thesis statement. The first subject is discrimination. The second
subject is the existence of the career tracks sōgōshoku and ippanshoku and its role in the
working life of the Japanese women. Lastly, as the third subject, I will discuss the current
politics implemented by Prime Minister Abe and his government in order to increase the
female workforce rate.
Gender-based discrimination – the interviews, the DISCO report and Joshi nabi
In order to be able to write about gender-based discrimination, I need to define the word
discrimination. In Oxford English Dictionary, it is defined as follows:
102
Ibid. Maiko. 103
26 Unjust or prejudicial treatment of a person or group, esp. on the grounds of race,
gender, sexual orientation, etc.; freq. with against.104
As I presented in chapter 7 and chapter 8, something that was expressed by both my
informants and the female students who participated in the DISCO report was low
expectations based on one’s gender. Many female students experienced interviews where they
felt that their abilities were being questioned or that they will get married and quit because
they were women. Both in my interviews and the DISCO report, women expressed how they
are questioned or are even met with surprise when they look for sōgōshoku jobs.
The ideas of the gender roles discussed in the theory chapter, where the Japanese husband is
expected to work outside of the home and the wife is expected to do housework and childcare, are something that seems to be highly affecting the informants’ views of working life
and what is to be expected in shūkatsu. Many of the students thought that it was only natural
that they were asked questions such as “You, as a girl, can you really do this?” or “What will
you do if you get married?” because of the current situation in Japan where many women quit
work after getting married or becoming pregnant. As a result, several of the students prepared
answers to questions about marriage and work before going to job interviews. Haruna also
told me that the reason she eventually gave up shūkatsu and decided to work at the bakery
where she was already working part-time was that she felt she was met with the attitude as if
they were thinking that she would quit when she got married and that if she joined a company
she would not be able to work there continuously.105 This shows that these attitudes definitely
affect the decisions of the female students in shūkatsu. Even though the equal employment
opportunity law was enacted to illegalize gender-based discrimination thirty years ago, these
accounts prove that these old-fashioned attitudes still exist in Japanese companies.
Moreover, I also brought up the feeling of being disadvantaged in chapter 8. A number of
these students feel that they have to work harder to show that they really can and want to
work, more than the male students need to. If they do not show their will to work well enough,
they are afraid that a male student will be chosen instead. Respondents in the DISCO report as
well as Ueda’s column and my informants, who addressed the low ratio of female employees
in sōgōshoku jobs, all point out that men are receiving job offers to a greater extent than
women do in sōgōshoku. Naturally, feeling disadvantaged is not a subject for discrimination.
104
Oxford English Dictionary, OED Third Edition, December 2013, accessed through the database of Stockholm University Library, May 18, 2015, 18:01. http://www.oed.com.ezp.sub.su.se/view/Entry/54060?redirectedFrom=discrimination#eid 105
Haruna. 27 However, I strongly argue that their accounts are all signs of unfair conditions on the Japanese
labor market.
The problem with the lack of female representation, where the majority of the interviewers
and students holding presentations on shūkatsu events are men, is not a case of direct
discrimination, although it might be the result of gender-based discrimination. It is also
problematic since it enhances the image of the real worker being a man and not a woman.
The most obvious example of differential treatment based on gender was the experience that
Satomi told me about, where the male students were interviewed on only three occasions,
while female students were interviewed on five. However, as I do not know the underlying
intention of the recruiters at the company, it is difficult to declare that it is an example of
gender-based discrimination. Nevertheless, it is a clear example of differential treatment. The
cases where the informants and the respondents in the DISCO report had been asked about
marriage, if they can really work even though they are women, being asked if they should not
look for ippanshoku instead, are also examples of differential treatment. Those questions are
based on prejudices against female students and since they specifically referred to their
gender, they could be objects for claims of discrimination. When I asked the informants if
they had experienced anything discriminating during shūkatsu, all of my informants replied
that they had not, in spite of several of them being asked this kind of questions. There seems
to be a high level of tolerance towards this kind of behavior, as if it is seen as something
inevitable.
The equal employment opportunity law was meant to rid Japanese companies of genderbased discrimination. In reality, it is more like a guideline for private companies, seeing as it
lacks a penalty clause.106 I argue that this is a huge flaw, making it an insufficient measure in
the battle against gender-based discrimination, and that it fails to deal with the negative
attitudes from companies as seen in my interview findings, the DISCO report and Ueda’s
column. The accounts of my informants and the DISCO report respondents prove that female
students have to battle against the image and prejudice of women who get married and quit. In
order to confront the actual problems in Japanese companies, something more than a
guideline is needed. Although my findings on gender-based discrimination in shūkatsu cannot
be viewed as a statistical proof, they are essential in illustrating an existing problem in the
Japanese society.
106
Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society, 169. 28 Sōgōshoku and ippanshoku – keeping status quo
Having to choose between two career tracks when doing shūkatsu means that the female
students already at this point have to think very long-term and prepare for different future
scenarios. The knowledge of the future possibility of having to choose between work and
child-care in the future, I believe this applies only to women. Ueda in Joshi nabi expressed
the idea that women think about their employment after thinking about their life plan,
marriage and future first – something Shizuka also expressed in my interview survey and
several respondents expressed in the DISCO report. In a society where women are nowadays
expected to work, but also take the main responsibility for child-care and housework, there
are many different ways to try to cope with this reality. Kaori said she was looking at
ippanshoku jobs because she wanted to be able to work and have children as well, implying
that having a sōgōshoku job and having children would be a difficult combination.107
Similarly, in the DISCO report, one of the students opting for ippanshoku did so to be able to
continue to work. This can also be seen in an article written by Sayaka Kai in Asahi Shimbun.
She writes about the trend of ippanshoku becoming a popular choice for female students who
are highly educated at prestigious universities in Japan. In the article, she interviews a female
graduate of Keiō University who had heard stories from her seniors with cases of becoming
depressed after working too hard in sōgōshoku, eventually ending up resigning. Because of
that, she wanted a job where she could continue to work even after marriage and childbirth
and chose ippanshoku.108 Before conducting my interview survey, I thought that ippanshoku
was for women who wanted to quit work when they had children. In reality, with sōgōshoku
being difficult to continue for women with children, it seems that there are women who
choose ippanshoku in order to be able to continue to work as well. Mayumi, Maiko and
Haruna said that when you are looking at sōgōshoku jobs as a woman, others might think that
it means that you do not intend to get married or have children, and that it can be seen as
throwing away one’s womanhood.109
I argue that the existing career track system with sōgōshoku and ippanshoku, where
sōgōshoku means putting a great effort into one’s career with overtime work and little free
time, and ippanshoku means having less advanced job assignments and more free time while
107
Kaori. 108
Sayaka Kai, Sōkei joshi ippanshoku ni sattō “nagaku hatarakitai” ura no honne 早慶女子「一般職」に殺到 「長く働きたい」裏の本音 [Girls from Waseda University and Keiō University rush to ippanshoku – the real intention behind “I want to a long career”], Asahi Shimbun, February 28, 2012, accessed May 18, 2015, 16:44. http://www.asahi.com/job/syuukatu/2013/etc/OSK201202240040_01.html 109
Mayumi, Maiko and Haruna. 29 having little chance of promotion and increase in pay, is perpetuating the gender roles at work.
My impression researching, doing the interviews and the overall lack of previous research on
the job-hunting process, is that the current system is not at all seen as a problem. When asking
about the informants’ thoughts on sōgōshoku and ippanshoku, my original intent was to find
out what career track they would like to choose for themselves, but during the interview some
of the informants answered more generally. Kaori and Satomi described sōgōshoku as the
work men do and ippanshoku as work for women.110 Kaori said: “Inside my head, sōgōshoku
equals men, ippanshoku equals women.”111 Shizuka also gave an example of the image of the
ippanshoku employee as that female ippanshoku employee that appears in [Japanese] TV
drama and how she never really had grown to like that picture.112 Furthermore, Saori
expressed that she thought the way of separating jobs into two career tracks matches the
reality in Japan, as there are many Japanese women who do not want to work that hard.113
However, my impression is that the division of career tracks into sōgōshoku and ippanshoku
seems to be reinforcing the gender roles on the labor market, forcing women in sōgōshoku to
copy the traditional role of the man. As I wrote in the Sōgōshoku and ippanshoku section of
the findings chapter, students looking at ippanshoku jobs seem to put an effort into displaying
their feminine side and their character as a woman. The traits given as examples by my
informants as desirable for employees in ippanshoku are very similar to the traits that Ehara
writes are viewed as traditionally feminine, such as taking on a supporting role, being
cheerful, devoted, thoughtful and having a polite way of speaking.114 In addition to
perpetuating the stereotypical gender roles at the Japanese workplace, the low wages and nonexisting chances of promotion in ippanshoku create a difficult financial situation for women,
who in many cases have to rely on marriage and a husband with a high income. In the earlier
mentioned article, a person in charge of personal affairs at a major company in finance
business expressed the following: “We can’t pay them [the ippanshoku employees] enough
wages to make it alone, not to speak of supporting a family. We do not intend to have all of
them work until retirement.”115
I argue that with the current expectations on employees in sōgōshoku, this kind of strict
division cannot be equal, as it leaves the women who also want time to take care of their
110
Kaori and Satomi. Kaori. 112
Shizuka. 113
Saori. 114
Ehara and Yamada, Introduction to Gender Sociology, 23. 115
Kai, “Girls from Waseda University and Keiō University rush to ippanshoku.” 111
30 children to jobs in ippanshoku with less pay, or in many cases eventually have them quit their
sōgōshoku job. I believe the workplace is simply too intolerant towards women and other
ways of working than the traditional male one, where no interruption is allowed. Even though
Japanese women are very highly educated, this intolerance exclude them, resulting in a failure
to make the most of their full potential. According to an article in The Economist, the
calculations of the investment company Goldman Sachs show that Japan could be able to
increase its GDP up to as much as 15 percent by raising the workforce participation rate for
women to the same level as men.116 Having that said, it is true that not all Japanese women
want to work and that there are many Japanese women who want to take care of their children
full-time for a longer period. The three-year-old child myth, that says that women who do not
take care of their children full-time until the age of three will damage the child’s mental
development and its character building, is a firmly rooted belief.117 The earlier mentioned
motherhood myth also plays a role.
However, I argue that by making sōgōshoku difficult to continue for women who have
children, the Japanese companies are indirectly excluding women. A major social problem in
the Japanese society is overworking. Sugimoto writes that the practice of service overtime –
overtime work without additional payment – is widely maintained and there are cases when
this practice results in what is called karōshi, which literally means death from excessive
work.118 When I was looking at job descriptions during shūkatsu, I saw several companies
adopting a so called no overtime day a week. Although it being a welcome change, it means
that all other days during the week are over-time work days. In such a working climate and in
a society where men participating in childrearing still are quite unusual, it is only natural that
a mother with a small child has a hard time keeping up, especially if there is no support from
her husband regarding childrearing. Therefore, I argue that the working climate and working
conditions in sōgōshoku are excluding women. When the equal employment opportunity law
was enacted, measures should have been taken to also tackle the problem of overworking by a
shortening of the working hours and get rid of the service overtime practice, which I believe
are the main reasons for women having difficulties staying in sōgōshoku. In addition, the lack
of a penalty clause in the equal employment opportunity law makes it ineffectual as a tool to
prevent actual gender-based discrimination. Instead of dealing with the underlying
116
“Japanese Women and Work – Holding back half the nation,” The Economist, March 29, 2014, accessed May 24, 2015 12:52. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21599763-­‐womens-­‐lowly-­‐status-­‐japanese-­‐
workplace-­‐has-­‐barely-­‐improved-­‐decades-­‐and-­‐country 117
Ehara and Yamada, Introduction to Gender Sociology, 88. 118
Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society, 112-­‐113. 31 fundamental problems of the Japanese working life, such as overwork, and attitudes towards
women and their abilities, Japanese companies introduced career tracks to keep things close to
the way they were, creating equality merely on the surface. Therefore, I argue that by
introducing sōgōshoku and ippanshoku, Japanese companies institutionalize gender-based
discrimination.
Abe’s womenomics – for the sake of women or for the country?
When I participated in shūkatsu events, I noticed that there were many companies having
female employees holding the information sessions. There were also a lot of women talking
about what kind of welfare program they have and how they support female workers and
working mothers. I saw this as an indication of the encouragement of higher female
workforce participation and as an effect of the political strategies advocated by Prime
Minister Abe. However, I have yet had to see information sessions where they encourage
male employees to use the benefits of the company and take paternal leave. Whenever there
was talk about child-care, it was done directly connected to the female way of working or the
working conditions for female employees in the company, reinforcing the idea that child-care
is women’s work only. This is exactly what the political strategies of Prime Minister Abe say
as well. His policies talk only about how women should be able to work and have children,
but do not address the problems of overtime work and high demands that do not approve of
any absence or interruption in work, that both men and women in sōgōshoku face.
Prime Minister Abe urges women to participate in the workforce and says that he wants to
create a society where women can shine.119 One of his ideas is to increase support for women
who have children by extending the child-care leave from 1.5 years to 3 years. Another
strategy is to increase the number of daycare centers.120 However, although women are
encouraged to work, there is no talk about changes in the social systems that are treating
housewives favorably. For example, marital deduction – a tax law that allows a person with a
spouse with little income to have income exemptions, saving the couple 380 000 yen per year
– is practiced.121 As the partner with the higher income often is the husband, this tax
deduction system benefits couples where the woman does not earn that much. Similarly, there
119
女性が輝く社会 josei ga kagayaku shakai The website of the Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet/官邸, Subete no josei ga kagayaku shakai zukuri honbu すべての女性が輝く社会づくり本部 [The headquarters of the making of a society where all women can shine], accessed May 19, 2015, 9:33, http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/headline/brilliant_women/ 120
“Towards a Japan where women shine.” 121
The website of the National Tax Agency/国税庁, No. 1191 Haigūshakōjo No. 1191 配偶者控除 [No. 1191 Marital deduction], accessed May 19, 2015, 10:02, https://www.nta.go.jp/taxanswer/shotoku/1191.htm 32 is also a special marital deduction, where a part of the husband’s income does not become
subject to income tax. The amount saved depends on the wife’s income – the higher her
income is, the smaller the benefit.122 The political strategies that Abe is trying to implement
are paradoxical – on one hand, he is telling women to work in order to boost the economy, but
on the other hand, he does not show any will to deal with the basic structures in the social
systems that are telling women not to work. If Abe is serious about making the Japanese
society a better place for working women, there is more to be done than increasing daycare
centers and extending child-care leave. Furthermore, one of Prime Minister Abe’s goals is to
increase the rate of women in management positions to 30 percent by the year of 2020.
However, there seems to be no detailed numbers of how that rate will be achieved.
As I also stated in the Sōgōshoku and ippanshoku section, another issue is the working
environment. Unless there is a change in the Japanese working culture, which emphases the
importance of service overtime, socialization at work and length of service, Abe’s strategies
will not have the anticipated effect on the working life of women. Also, unless a period of the
extended child-care leave is reserved for the father, there is a possibility that it will reinforce
the idea of child-care being the responsibility of the woman. If serious measures to change the
working climate are not taken, the extension of the child-care leave might even be counter
effective and result in supporting housewives, seeing as the social systems already treat them
favorably.
10. Conclusion
The traditional gender roles seem to be highly affecting the female students’ view on work
and what they can expect in shūkatsu. The division of career tracks into sōgōshoku and
ippanshoku seems to be reinforcing the gender roles on the labor market, forcing women in
sōgōshoku to copy the traditional role of the man – a role that does not approve of any
interruptions. In addition to perpetuating the stereotypical gender roles at the Japanese
workplace, the low wages and non-existing chances of promotion and wage increase in
ippanshoku create a difficult financial situation for many women. This also reinforces the
gender roles, as many women in ippanshoku have to rely on marriage and a husband with a
high income. The same structures that the equal employment opportunity law was meant to
rid the Japanese companies of do still exist, proving that the law has been ineffectual in
122
The website of the National Tax Agency/国税庁, No. 1195 Haigūshatokubetsukōjo No. 1191 配偶者特別控
除 [No. 1191 Special marital deduction], accessed May 19, 2015, 10:17, https://www.nta.go.jp/taxanswer/shotoku/1195.htm 33 tackling the issue of discrimination.
It is difficult to say whether the examples of the differential treatment of the female students
in shūkatsu brought up in this thesis would be labeled as gender-based discrimination in a
legal context in Japan. Satomi’s experience of having to do five interviews when men only
needed to do three, as well as comments questioning the informants’ abilities because of their
gender, could be subject to gender-based discrimination. Although my findings on genderbased discrimination in shūkatsu cannot be viewed as a statistical proof, they are essential in
illustrating the problem of differential treatment and excluding attitudes in shūkatsu. The
accounts of my informants and the DISCO report respondents prove that female students have
to battle against the image and prejudice of women who get married and quit. I also believe
that sōgōshoku being inaccessible or impossible to continue for women who have children is a
kind of indirect discrimination. Furthermore, the lack of female representation, low
expectations towards women and the fact that many female students feel that they have to
work harder than the men to be employed, are not examples of discrimination. However, they
all demonstrate unfair conditions and prejudices of the companies in shūkatsu.
The students who participated in my interviews all said that they would like to continue to
work even after marriage and childbirth. For the sake of the future female workers of Japan, I
hope that change will come and make it possible.
11. Summary
In my thesis Gender-discrimination in Japanese job-hunting – listening to the voices of future
workers, I have examined the experience of shūkatsu, the job-hunting process, among female
Japanese students through the lens of gender theory. By reviewing relevant chapters in Ehara
and Yamada’s Introduction to Gender Sociology and Nishimura’s The Sociology of Childcare and Work, I have provided background information crucial to understanding the current
situation for Japanese women in shūkatsu. Furthermore, by analyzing materials such as the
DISCO report and Ueda’s column on advice to female students doing shūkatsu, I have given
an overview of shūkatsu for the young women of today’s Japan. By presenting the results of
my in-depth interviews, I have also given a more detailed picture with concrete examples
from the actual experiences of Japanese female students.
Although the equal employment opportunity law was enacted as long as thirty years ago,
there is still gender-based discrimination in shūkatsu. As found in the materials I analyzed as
well as in my interviews, there seems to be a general lack of belief in and low expectations on
34 the abilities of women. The students themselves also seem to think that it is only natural to be
asked what they will do if they get married and if they can really do the job despite their
gender. The equal employment opportunity law, lacking a penalty clause, has been an
ineffectual measure to rid the Japanese labor market of gender-based discrimination. I have
also argued that the introduction of the career tracks known as sōgōshoku and ippanshoku in
Japanese companies are perpetuating the gender roles on the Japanese labor market, where
women in many cases end up having to choose between either having a career or having
children and a family. Japanese companies, with a working culture that requires its employees
to work over-time without extra payment on a regular basis and does not forgive any
interruption in their work, also exclude women who have children. The fact that the
traditional gender roles pushes the responsibility for child-care on the woman only also helps
maintaining this indirect discrimination. Lastly, I have argued that the politics advocated by
Prime Minister Abe will not have the desired effect on the female workforce participation rate
unless measures are taken to change the social systems that are still supporting the housewife
model and restricting working women. If the working conditions are not made more
accessible to women, Prime Minister Abe’s plans to prolong the period of child-care leave to
three years might even be counter effective.
In my research, I have been able to shed light on the issue of gender-based discrimination in
shūkatsu as well as the injustice that lies in the sōgōshoku and ippanshoku career track system,
which is very rarely brought up and talked about as a problem.
35 12. Bibliography
Literature
Ehara, Yumiko and Yamada, Masahiro. Jendā no shakaigaku nyūmon ジェンダーの社会学
入門 [Introduction to Gender Sociology]. Tokyo: Iwanami Textbooks, 2008.
Nishimura, Junko. Kosodate to shigoto no shakaigaku 子育てと仕事の社会学 [The
Sociology of Child-care and Work]. Tokyo: Kōbundō, 2014.
Sugimoto, Yoshio. An Introduction to Japanese Society – Third Edition. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010 (1997).
Articles
“Japanese Women and Work – Holding back half the nation.” The Economist, March 29,
2014. Accessed May 24, 2015, 12:52. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21599763womens-lowly-status-japanese-workplace-has-barely-improved-decades-and-country
Kai, Sayaka. Sōkei joshi ippanshoku ni sattō “nagaku hatarakitai” ura no honne 早慶女子「
一般職」に殺到 「長く働きたい」裏の本音 [Girls from Waseda University and Keiō
University rush to ippanshoku – the real intention behind “I want to a long career”], Asahi
Shimbun, February 28, 2012. Accessed May 18, 2015, 16:44.
http://www.asahi.com/job/syuukatu/2013/etc/OSK201202240040_01.html
Ueda Akemi no shin joshi nabi 上田晶美の新女子ナビ[Akemi Ueda’s new navigation for
girls], Shūkatsu ON!, Yomiuri Shimbun, July 8, 2014.
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Shūkatsu ON!, Yomiuri Shimbun, August 6, 2013.
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Shūkatsu ON!, Yomiuri Shimbun, June 4, 2013.
Ueda Akemi no joshi nabi 上田晶美の新女子ナビ[Akemi Ueda’s navigation for girls],
Shūkatsu ON!, Yomiuri Shimbun, April 2, 2013. Internet resources
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http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/headline/women2013.html
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the making of a society where all women can shine]. Accessed May 19, 2015, 9:33.
http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/headline/brilliant_women/
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控除 [No. 1191 Marital deduction]. Accessed May 19, 2015, 10:02.
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配偶者特別控除 [No. 1191 Special marital deduction]. Accessed May 19, 2015, 10:17.
https://www.nta.go.jp/taxanswer/shotoku/1195.htm
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shūshokukatsudō of female students]. Accessed April 12, 2015, 22:47.
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37 Report written by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in
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38 13. Appendix
Interview questions about discrimination in shūkatsu
１．就職活動はいつから始められましたか。
２．どのような企業を見られましたか。
３．総合職と一般職について、どのような考えをされましたか。
４．就職活動において、企業のどのようなところを重視されましたか。（どうして
ですか。）
５．面接を受けての感想を聞かせてもらえますか。どう感じましたか。
６．女性として就職活動をしていて、特に意識されたことなどがありましたか。
７．就職活動において、差別的だと感じたことなどがありましたか。
８．将来、仕事のことをどのように考えていますか。
９．（就活を終えた人に：最終的に、決まった就職先は何が決め手となりました
か。）
１０．ご両親は（育児を）どうしていたかについて聞いてもいいですか？
39