Persisntent Invisible Inequality in Education: Sociology of Education and Gender Studies in Japan

Japanese sociology of education has a long history. Women and education and gender issues in education have bocme some of the main topics in the sociology of education since the 1980s. This presentation traces the transformation of feminist discourses in education in Japan, focusing especially on the hidden curriculum, gender classification through family socialization, and gender order penetrated in Japanese society deeply, while following the main issues of sociology of education since the 1980s to the present.

Gender is an important lens through which we can interprete the role of education in society and the ways in which it contributed to social change in late modernity. In this presentation, I will focus on the following three points; first, to understand gendered schooling and education in Japan, empirical data of Japanese education such as gender tracking, faculty components, the ratio of female teachers and principals, and female researchers in academic fields examined from a comparative perspective. Secondly, based on the analysis of the trends of articles related to gender issues in the Journal of JSES, the reality of persisntent inequality in education will be discussed. Thirdly, I consider the issues of inequality of gender and other disparities in Japan, knowledge transmission, power relations and reproduction within the era of Neo-liberalism.