Identity Integration of Japanese Married Working Women With and Without Children: Relationships Between Overall Identity and Context-Specific Identities

Abstract

With challenging roles at home and in the workplace, today's working women establish multiple identities in their various social relationships. However, it is unclear how working women with and without children maintain and integrate their multiple identities. This article approaches this question by examining the relationships between working women's overall and context-specific identities. All study participants were married and employed as full-time workers (101 with children and 80 without children). The findings indicated that, across all identity dimensions, Japanese married working women similarly integrated multiple context-specific identities by salience in their self-definition regardless of childbirth experience. However, women with and without children were different in that married women's overall identities became largely dependent on fewer particularly salient context-specific identities after childbirth.