The Changing Gender Relations in Marriage and Fertility in Japan

The trend toward later marriage and growth in the proportion of men and women who never marry is a major cause of the Japan’s low fertility rate. Similar to some countries in East Asia, Japan is a country where traditional gender role expectations, i.e. a husband works outside home and a wife stays at home for household tasks and childrearing, have been firmly rooted in the society, despite of the high level of women’s enrollment to tertiary education. Previous studies often pointed out that the gap between women’s increasing demand or potentials for market labor and the norms of the traditional gender role attitudes leads to women’s retreat from marriage, thus causing the expansion of the non-marriage population in Japan. However, more recent studies began to show a reversed relationship between women’s socio-economic standings and marriage and fertility behaviors. For example, studies using the latest and largest panel survey which covers the first decade of the 2000s show that women with more income or higher education are more likely to marry than their less or lower counterparts in the era of 2000s. Other study also shows that married women who have a full-time standard job or who are entitled to childcare leave are as likely as women without a job to have the first and second births. How can we interpret these changes? This study first introduces some of the old and new findings regarding to the relationship between women’s socio-economic characteristics and family and fertility transitions. Thereafter, the study seeks for the socio-demographic explanations behind the change and discusses the possible implications for the future trends of family and fertility in Japan.