2022 Volume 73 Issue 2 Pages 86-102
How has women’s employment changed during childbearing and childrearing? Have educational differentials in women’ s employment increased? These are important questions for understanding the changes in gender inequality and stratification among women as well as among households. We re-examined the trends in women’ s employment and their relations with education during the childbearing period, with a special focus on the labor market structural changes represented by the increase in the non-regular employment sector replacing the decrease in the self-employment sector. We use data that contains employment histories from two years before and six years after the first childbirth for women who gave birth to a child between 1970 and 2009, constructed from the Social Stratification and Mobility survey in Japan, 1985, 1995, 2005, and 2015. Comparing the 10-years childbirth cohorts, the following results were obtained: During these decades, the overall employment rate increased only slightly. The composition of employment has largely shifted. The employment rate in the self-employed sector had decreased in tandem with the increase in the employment rate in the non-regular employment sector, while the employment rate in the regular employment sector had not increased. The employment rate after childbirth had increased, but this was mostly due to an increase in non-regular employment. Regarding trends by educational group, junior college graduates’ employment rates increased significantly. In the most recent cohort, employment rates of vocational school, junior college, and university graduates were similar. Most of the increase among vocational school and junior college graduates was due to the rise in the rate of non-regular employment, whereas the increase among university graduates was moderate. In contrast, among high school graduates, the employment rate had not increased. The results suggest that educational differentials grew between high school graduates and those with a higher education.
