Article published In: Reconsidering Language and Gender in Contemporary Japan and among the Japanese Diaspora amid the #MeToo Movement
Edited by Kikuko Omori and Hiroshi Ota
[Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 33:1] 2023
► pp. 12–37
Transmission of gender ideology through family discourse
Japanese mothers and their career choices
Published online: 19 July 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00077.ima
https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00077.ima
Abstract
Informed by the social cognitive theory of co-orientation, this qualitative study explored the impact of family and social discourse on women’s motherhood and professional identities through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 13 Japanese women born in the decade before and after the Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Law was established in 1986. Overall, the interviews revealed two lifestyle categories – semi-traditional and modern. Specifically, the interviews revealed that women in the semi-traditional and modern categories enacted some form of change in their gender ideology and that women in the modern category experienced more dialogue-based communication and equal power dynamic with their husbands compared to women in the semi-traditional category in which they experienced one-way communication and a greater power differential with husbands. Informed by the literature on cultural values, the findings from this study conclude that Japanese women’s empowerment is built not by resistance to oppression but by conquering the over-taxation.
Article outline
- Impact of family discourse on gender reality construction
- Gender roles and ideology in Japan
- Motherhood ideology as a social system
- Method
- Participants
- Data collection procedures
- Data analysis
- Results
- RQ1.Discourse within the Family of Origin and Ideological Formation
- Transmission of traditional values
- Career guidance
- RQ2.Current family and social discourse and gender roles
- The ideal image of a mother
- Communication and division of labor
- Internal dialectical tensions
- RQ3.Power dynamic and its impact on maternal and professional identities
- Power dynamics with husbands
- Power dynamics with parents and parents-in-law
- Interpellation of gender ideology
- Discussion
- Implications for social cognitive theory of co-orientation
- Contemporary gender ideology and cultural values
- Limitations
- Future directions
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