Changes in the Links between Home and Work after Marriage in the Tokyo Metropolitan Suburbs

Abstract

This paper examines the factors that make many married women living in the Tokyo metropolitan suburbs quit their jobs after getting married and reenter the workforce after completing child-rearing in terms of labor market segmentation by gender, age, and space. In the Tokyo metropolitan area, the labor market is segmented; it is male and unmarried female full-time workers who work in the central city, and married women take part-time employment in the suburbs. Women working in the central city become housewives in the suburbs after marriage under such circumstances in the labor market. For families with infants living in the suburbs, the proportion of dual-earner households is only one-fifth of the total. Observing the changes in the links between home and work caused by marriage can provide insight into the causal factors. Because existing data cannot be used for this purpose, we made use of a unique data set collected through a questionnaire survey of 301 households in Urawa city, Saitama Prefecture, in the suburbs of Tokyo. This data set includes abundant information regarding places of residence and employment before and after marriage. The first step in the analysis is to examine the impact of long-distance marriage migration on changes in women's working circumstances. Because of the distance between the couples' workplaces before getting married, relationships between the family and the workplace undergo drastic changes. In cases where the distance was 30km or greater in particular, most wives left their jobs or changed their workplaces. The results of the quantitative analysis using Quantification Theory II suggest that the impact of migration after marriage on the changes in wives' working conditions is stronger than that of schooling and the occupation of the couples. This lowers the percentage of employment among married women in the suburbs. The second step in the analysis is to illustrate the commuting patterns of 219 households in which both the wives and husbands lived in the Tokyo metropolitan area before or around the time of their marriage. Although 24% of the wives of those households left their jobs after marriage, 69% became dual-earner households thereafter. Generally in suburban dual-earner households after child-rearing, husbands commute to the central city and wives take up jobs in the neighborhood; however, that commuting pattern accounted for only 12% of the dual-earner households. This originates from the labor market conditions segmented by gender, age and space. In 34% of the dual-earner households, wives and husbands commuted from the suburbs to the center of Tokyo in about 60 minutes. Since this commuting pattern is inconsistent with the housework and child rearing, wives who worked in the center of Tokyo showed a marked tendency to quit their jobs after marriage. These results suggest that the Tokyo metropolitan area needs patriarchal institutions justifying the predominance of men over women to sustain its structure.