Online Seminar - Unpaid Care and Domestic Work in Japan
- 9 November 2021
- 12:00 - 13:15 (GMT)
- Online
- https://dajf.org.uk/event/unpaid-care-and-domestic-work-in-japan
- events@dajf.org.uk
- Tweet
Women in Japan were estimated before the pandemic to spend 4.8 times as much time as men on unpaid work, a gap significantly higher than that of the UK, where it is 1.8x. Pandemic-related measures and lockdowns have increased the burden on women, who face difficulties balancing the number of unpaid working hours with the rest of their lives. Despite being a serious situation in Japanese society, this multifaceted problem is rarely taken up by politicians and often overlooked by the media.
In this webinar, the speakers will discuss the current situation in Japan and its causes, including multigenerational households and caring relationships, as well as the social norms and structures that reinforce gender inequality in Japan.
About the contributors
Dr Junko Yamashita
Dr Junko Yamashita is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She is known for her work on social and policy analysis of welfare, care, families, intergenerational relations, inequality and gender with a specific focus on care and care work. Recently Dr. Yamashita co-edited ‘Routledge Handbook of East Asian Gender Studies’ (Liu and Yamashita 2020, Routledge), and co-authored ‘Hitori de Yaranai Ikuji Kaigo no Daburu Kea’ (Don’t manage it alone: Dual care of Childcare and Elderly care ) (Soma and Yamashita 2020, Popura sya, in Japanese). Her recent research projects include an international collaborative research project on ‘Dual Responsibility of Care in East Asia’. She also co-led ‘Experiments in Collective Car’ project; collaborating with a local artist, bringing together art, archival research and public engagement through a public exhibition on collective care.
Dr Ekaterina Hertog
Dr Ekaterina Hertog is a Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. Dr Hertog’s research interests lie at the intersection of family sociology and digital sociology. She leads the ESRC-funded Domestic AI project that aims to scope new technologies’ potential to free up time now locked into unpaid domestic labour and measure how willing people are to introduce these technologies into their private lives. Dr Hertog is also a research fellow at the GenTime research project, investigating gender differences in time use in East Asia. Dr Hertog’s time use research looks at factors that impact the gender balance in the domestic division of labour, associations between children’s time use patterns and their natal family characteristics, and gender differences in time use at old age. Her research has appeared in journals including Journal of Marriage and Family, Demographic Research, PLOS One, and Journal of Population Aging.
