This colloquium explores ways in which Japanese working women legitimize, evaluate, and rationalize their career choices, aiming to reveal: 1) how they make use of dominant cultural norms and social categories in the process,... [ view full abstract ]
This colloquium explores ways in which Japanese working women legitimize, evaluate, and rationalize their career choices, aiming to reveal: 1) how they make use of dominant cultural norms and social categories in the process, and 2) how they newly redefine norms and categories in interaction. Although the number of working women in Japan has been steadily increasing, in 2003 the ratio of women in managerial posts was the lowest (12%) among the so-called “developed” countries. The ratio has remained almost the same even after a decade (11.9% in 2013), despite a government policy to raise the ratio and business organizations’ efforts to improve their institutional supports for women, mainly because, as many surveys indicate (e.g., Creia Consulting, 2014), most women workers do not aspire to get promoted. This indicates that it is necessary to take into account the effect of cultural norms such as gender ideologies (Sunderland, 2004) to understand how a woman makes her career choices. We demonstrate that detailed analysis of interview data can bring new insights into the complex relationships between hegemonic ideologies and each woman’s personal choices, as well as the ways she actively transforms and creates norms and categories in claiming her public and private identities.
The five contributions of this colloquium conduct discourse analyses of one set of audio-recorded interviews with four women managers and four young non-managers (60-minutes each) collected in Japan in 2016. Examining the same set of data from five different perspectives and using a range of methodologies, including positioning theory, stance, lexical analysis, membership categorization analysis, and inter/subjective analyses, we disclose multiple strategies the women employ in structuring the interview narratives. The findings show that, rather than simply being restricted by dominant gender ideologies, the women actively utilize them to legitimate the narratives about their career trajectories. In the process, the social meanings of gender norms and the regimentation of social categories slightly change, at least within each specific interaction. The colloquium intends to shed light on the ways the speakers simultaneously reproduce and transform ideologies in interaction.
Reference
Sunderland, J. (2004). Gendered Discourses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
