2022 Volume 89 Issue 4 Pages 565-578
This paper aims to explain the long-term transformation of Japanese women's life courses, using the results of quantitative sociological analyses. Large-scale work history data has been obtained by representative surveys such as the Social Stratification and Mobility Surveys. This paper first introduces methods of constructing age-based life course data and presenting the visualized results of analyses. In order to confirm changes in women's life courses, it is important to compare the visualized patterns among birth cohorts. Three turning points are crucial in the history of Japanese women's education, occupation and family formation: the wartime regime in the early 1940s, the oil crisis period of the mid-1970s, and the lost decade of the mid-1990s.
This paper begins by clarifying the effects of social changes in the mid-1970s, showing that the well-known M-shaped pattern of Japanese women's labor force participation was formed during that period. This pattern is quite evident in the life courses of female high school graduates born between 1931 and 1945. They tended to work as regular employees until their mid-20s, then to quit after marriage or childbirth and reenter the labor market as non-regular employees at the age of about 40. This M-shaped pattern was the standard Japanese women's life course until the mid-1990s.
Then, during the lost decade from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, the work-life patterns of women in their 20s and early 30s, those of the 1971-75 birth cohort, changed. Using the JGSS-2009 LCS and the JGSS-2013 LCS Wave 2, this paper shows that the system of fulltime employment is declining and that irregular employment is increasing. The overall patterns of Japanese women's life courses tend to differentiate into many separate paths. It is argued that while differentiated and individualized life course paths expand the number of possible options for life trajectories, some routes can be destabilized in unexpected ways by events of the time such as major natural disasters. This is a characteristic of contemporary life course patterns.
Last, the paper focuses on the impacts of the wartime regime on women's life courses, analyzing the 1983 Women's Occupational Mobility and Career Survey. The results reveal that the life course patterns of the 1921-25 birth cohort were affected by the wartime labor demands from their late teens to early 20s. In particular, while clerical jobs and manual work expanded among young middle school graduates during the early 1940s, most of them were no longer working by the age of 25, after the war. This life course pattern for women through their mid-20s is very similar to the pattern of female high school graduates born from 1931 to 1945, although similar life patterns were not found in the 1926-30 birth cohort. These results imply that from World War II through the immediate postwar era, a prototype life pattern for women in their early 20s emerged among female middle school graduates in Japan. This paper argues that this prototype has had an enduring effect on the life patterns of women in the subsequent birth cohorts.
