Cohort-Specific Life Experiences Under Rapidly Changing Socioeconomic Conditions

Abstract

Changes in women’s family and employment behaviours and related conditions are examined for the 1960s cohort, as well as for the preceding and following cohorts. Official Japanese statistics show a declining trend in both marriage and marital fertility, as well as the indistinctness of the M-shaped curve for women’s employment patterns, which both reflect the diversification of women’s life course. A new lifestyle emerged among women in the 1960s cohort, which was characterised by staying single, having no children, maintaining full-time employment, and delay in social norms. Changes in education, laws, and social norms are the background for this transformation. Law/policy changes in the 1980s created workplaces that were gender equal and encouraged continuous full-time employment on their surface did not promote women’s continued employment while they were raising children in reality, but it created public opinions that let women who remained unmarried and childless to continue working go. It was also during this time that social norms were being restructured to make social systems suitable to an aging society with an increasing lifespan. In the 1990s, there was also a change in social norms toward stigmatizing pregnancy at an advanced age because of the changing criteria used in medicine/health policy. These changes influenced the characteristics of life course of the 1960s cohort.