From women’s college to work: Inter-organizational networks in the Japanese female labor market

Abstract

This study examines how inter-organizational networks linking schools to large corporations supersede labor market processes in Japan by focusing on the contribution of educational institutions to individual employment outcomes. A women’s college, as an organization, has the goal of increasing its reputation by catering to social norms through placing its students with large (prestigious) Japanese corporations—mostly in the position of “Office Ladies.” Therefore, the role of a school is to recommend to Japan’s large corporations only those students who would make suitable clerical workers. The results of ordinal and multinomial logit regressions showed that the effect of school support on being hired by larger corporations was significant. More importantly, schools tend to support dependent women with their parents and junior college students, but not students with just household skills. This serves the school’s interest in survival by satisfying the employers’ preference of hiring such women. These results indicate how the inter-organizational network reinforces the status quo and leads to the reproduction of current gender-based status hierarchies in Japanese society.