Chapter 5 Ryo Tanitsu

The reading this week is about the masculinity and femininity.  One thing that I remark in the reading is the fact that the masculinity-femininity dimension is entirely unrelated to national wealth. Many people believe that inequality between men and women is weakened as nations become wealthier since they can establish the corrective system in order for women to get as much opportunities as men. However, the wealthness does not matter to the masculinity and femininity, which means cultural background or people deep-seated consciousness about gender is deeply related to the gender problem.

Japan is considered to be a high masculinity country. Certainly, the gender gap is the big issue in Japan ,especially the unbalanced career opportunities between gender. Despite the rates of women going to universities are higher than those of men, women are struggling to get jobs or get higher positions in their job more than men. One of the reasons for this is that Japanese deep-rooted stereotype that men should work hard and women stay at home to help their husband. Due to this partial view, the companies tend to employ men as a high position. Another reason of this is that it is difficult for women to continue their job after giving birth to children. Of course, there is still not enough system to support women after having baby in Japan, there is still biased view in the Japanese society that only women should focus entirely on child-raising, which is the cause of women’s reluctance to work. In addition, Japanese men are not cooperative to help housework. I think that this is not only caused by the men’s laziness but also caused by the fact that Japanese company require too much work from men and they do not have time to engage in domestic affairs. As noted above, Japanese gender gap stem from people deep-seated consciousness.

It is said that hiring more women for job improve company’s efficiency and profits since it provides diversity in decision-making of the company. The diversity is important in decision-making of the company because they can view the problem from different perspective and accordingly they are likely to find new approach to the problem. In Japan, there are still hidden women’s workforce. By making effective use of these workforce, I believe that Japanese economy will resurge in the near future.