Education, Employment, and Gender Role Attitudes Of Japanese Married Women In The 21st Century: Declining Significance Of Rational Choice and Cognitive Dissonance Reduction?

Several students of attitude change have utilized models that combine rational choice with cognitive dissonance. Kimura (2007) proposed a hypothesis of “rational choice and cognitive dissonance under the constraint of the segmented labor market” in order to explain the apparently paradoxical associations among education, employment, and gender role attitudes found in the data of Japanese married women in 1980s and 1990s. There was a negative relationship between educational attainment and attitudes towards the gender division of labor, a negative association between these attitudes and employment, and also a negative association between educational attainment and employment. If we analyze the data in the early 21st century, however, we can find that all of these associations are weaker than before. Although this seems to reduce the explanatory power of the hypothesis that postulates rational choice and cognitive dissonance reduction, I will examine the factors that may have contributed to these changes form a rational choice perspective. On the one hand, surveys on gender role attitudes, as well as media reports on these surveys, have pervaded Japan so that respondents might have come to regard a negative attitude towards the gender division of labor as a socially desirable response. On the other hand, protracted recession have reduced the size of the fulltime labor market as well as the husband’s income so that even highly educated wives might have become unable to resist working as part-time or dispatched workers. The former implies that another kind of rationality plays a part while the latter implies that structural constraints on rationality are significant.