Social Location of the Graduate Women

Abstract

This study deals with a question about the occupatien of the graduated women from higher education under a hypothesis that they take a profession in order to regain their prestige, which is gradually deprived of the keeper of the familial functions with changes of the modern family and the occupational world. Some of the results are as follows. Changes about the higher educated persons occur in the same directions in both countries but more rapidly in Japan than in West Germany. The quantitative priority in the occupational structure of the university graduates alters from service industries as well as professional and technical fields to the secondary and tertiary industries as well as business and trade. Women graduates show a different pattern about their occupational structure from men. They do not take a new pattern, but an old one, evaluation to which is already socially solid. Among such kinds they take especially a profession the content of which is similar to the functions of a family, which allows them with less difficulties to fulfill a role as a keeper of familial functions or the entrance into which is permitted by objective examinations. Girl students are massed in the majoring fields which have a close connection with female occupations whose content is similar to familial functions. Although the direction of recent changes in the labor market seeks for women who have studied the subjects which are favored by fewer girls till now, women in such subject fields must struggle in taking a position in this field, graduates of the female subjects proceeding also here. What they thought to be works more strongly than what they actually are. A profession whose entrance is assured by au objective qualification hardly garantees its followers a position of still higher status in pursuing it. Further more women mount an educational ladder and take a profession which is institutionally regarded as that for a university graduate. As it is institutionalized, it does not accrd with a constly changing system of prestige any longer. It results from here a paradox that the greater the part of college graduates in the population is, the harder the higher educated women can gain position of a highest status in the society. Such phenomena of cultural lags are observed in both countries, but more obviously in Japan, where changes occur faster, than in West Germany.