Regional Difference in Women's Life Course and Causal Mechanisms

Abstract

The concept of the cohort has been broadly adopted in social science because scholars emphasize that those who experience the same era at the same life stage have similar life histories and social attitudes. However, how life is lived and social attitudes are influenced by the region in which one lives or has lived. In this study, the authors examined regions as providers of both opportunities and constraints for human beings and comparatively analyzed the life courses of two groups of women in their 30s, mainly based on data from questionnaire surveys and some interviews. One group was Kanazawa respondents who had graduated from S High School in the city of Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture. S High School has a few rival schools in terms of students' performance and continuing to higher education. Teachers eagerly recommended that students enter the faculty of education at local national universities, because places at national universities are highly valued in the region and the faculty of education is easier to enter than other faculties. Apart from which schools to attend, continuing to higher education immediately after high school graduation is given great importance. Thus female students were advised to take the entrance exams to a junior college specializing in nursing just to be on the safe side, irrespective of whether they hoped to be nurses. This teacher-driven educational tracking was criticized by most of the Kanazawa respondents, and some graduates of S High School were troubled by the gap between the jobs suitable for their major in university/college and the ones they really wanted. But it is also true that a respectable number of female graduates became teachers, nurses, or civil service employees, due to the career guidance of S High School. It is well known that women in these occupations tend to continue to work after marriage and childbirth, supported by fairly good employment conditions. In addition, married couples tend to live with the husband's parents and share housekeeping and childcare in Kanazawa. Therefore the labor force participation rate of married Kanazawa respondents was rather high. The other group was Yokohama respondents who had graduated from K High School located in the city of Yokohama. K High School ranks with S High School in student abilities, and most students of K High School embark on higher education after graduation. In K High School, there was no substantial intervention of teachers when students considered careers after the high school graduation. Located in the Tokyo metropolitan area, Yokohama respondents had many alternatives of universities/colleges to enter. They did not place much importance on the possibility of obtaining practical knowledge and skills for employment in choosing a university/college in which to enroll, rather it was naive interest in a specific field of study or the fame of the university that counted. Yokohama respondents also had many options when they sought a job after graduation from university/college. In job hunting, they valued the corporate culture and large firms, rather than the job description itself. Yokohama respondents mostly followed their life course based on their own volition. However, image-led job hunting with little practical knowledge sometimes resulted in job turnovers due to the gap between hopes for and the reality of employment. Over 90% of married Yokohama respondents were members of nuclear families and this made it difficult to balance employment and childcare. Long and stressful commuting was also a hurdle for Yokohama respondents who worked outside the home, in contrast to the Kanazawa respondents' short commutes by car. The high labor force participation rate of married Kanazawa respondents was not the result of a reasonable and purposeful determination with consideration for the actual conditions of the local labor market.