Career Plan and Gender Norms Among High School Girls in Tokyo

In sharp contrast to many North American and European countries, the M-shaped pattern of labor force participation rate of Japanese married women has been so far persisting to a substantial extent.  Due to the decrease in productive age population and reluctance to opening the labor market for immigrants, Japanese policy makers regard married women with a young child as one of its remaining human resources to be tapped, and propose some policy options which give an incentive to join a paid work by reducing their burdens of unpaid early child care.  On the other hand, Hakim (1992) suggests that the girls’ anticipation of their own future career (career plan) affects their labor market participation in middle-ages.  According to her inference, career plan at the time of early adolescence among girls has an influence on the decision-making about their labor force participation of decades later and therefore gender division of labor as well. 

The present research aims to explore what kind of factors relates to the attitude to their career plan among female high school students.  In particular, our attention lies in its relationship with gender role norms.  The research conducted a self-administered survey to second year students (at the age of 15 or 16) who attended ten public high schools in Tokyo and analyzed the data consisting of female respondents with multinomial and nested binomial model.  The results are basically supportive of Hakim’s “graceful slaves vs self-made women” hypothesis.  In addition, although the constraint to our data collection makes it less assertive, the job status of respondent’s mother affects daughter’s career plans.