性別役割分業と出生：『21 世紀出生児縦断調査』による 2 時点比較
Gender Role Division and Parity Progression in Japan:
A Period Comparison of Population-Based Longitudinal Studies
福田節也（国立社会保障・人口問題研究所）
・加藤承彦（国立成育医療研究センター）
Setsuya Fukuda (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research)
Tsuguhiko Kato (National Center for Child Health & Development)
fukuda-setsuya@ipss.go.jp

Introduction
How gender equality and equity relate to fertility becomes a central concern for population
scholars as well as policy makers in developed countries. Both the theories and empirical studies from western countries suggest that achieving higher levels of gender equality or equity
within the household can lead to higher fertility in the societies where gender gaps in educationand employment are small. However, previous findings on this topic are either theoretical or being based on cross-national comparisons, and their focus is largely limited to Western societies.
Japan is a country where the economy is highly developed, while the levels of gender equality is
one of the lowest among high-income nations. The country’s population started to decline since2011 due to the prolonged period of the lowest-low fertility. In 2012, however, Japan’s Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe and his cabinet announced that expanding opportunities for women to join
Japan’s labor force, “womenomics”, is one of the key pillars in their economic revival strategy
and started several policies to change Japan’s gender climate. Our study provides new evidence
from Japan about how associations of gender relations with parity progression are affected in
the time of changing gender norms.

Data and Method
We use population-based panel data from the 2001 and the 2010 cohorts of “Longitudinal Survey of Newborns in the 21st Century”. Our study examines associations of couples’ participation in both market labor and domestic work with transition to the second and third births byemploying event-history analysis. In the model, the following variables are used as covariates:
wife’s and husband’s employment statuses, couple’s participations in housework and childcare
activities, wife’s anxiety and feelings of burden over child rearing, first child characteristics

such as sex and birth month of the first child, whether the first child was born as premature baby
or not and whether first birth was a consequence of premarital pregnancy or not, and otherhousehold and demographic characteristics such as wife’s education levels, coresidence withgrandparents, wife’s age at first birth, region of residence and size of municipality. The associations of male and female participations in housework and childcare with parity progression arecompared between the observation periods of 2001-2006 and 2010-2014 as the survey follows
the households of newborns born in 2001 and 2010 in Japan. By taking an advantage of thisunique survey design, we evaluate how the associations change between the two periods; one
period with less gender equality and another with better.

Preliminary Results
One of the authors has already conducted preliminary analysis on the transition to the second
birth based on the period of 2001-2006 (Fukuda 2017). The analysis revealed that the transition
rates from first to second birth are higher in Japan among gender traditional families which aresingle earner households with husbands’ stable employments and wives’ great commitments tohousework, than gender equal families of dual-earner households. However, husband’s greater
participation in childcare can contribute to higher chance of the second birth, irrespective to thewife‘s employment status. Men’s greater concern to childrearing is positively relating to fertility
outcomes in Japan. The paper also find a strong negative effect of wife’s higher commitment tohousework on the second birth hazard when the wife works full-time. This could be a negative
fertility response to the “second shift”. However, our analyses consistently reveal that husbands’
supports in housework do not remedy the negative consequence on fertility. Instead, our analysis suggests that a large part of the physical and psychological burdens of the full-time employed wives is, in fact, mitigated by coresident parents. The only exception for this relationshipwas a situation where a wife is self-employed as husband’s greater participation in housework
has a positive effect on the transitions to the second birth. We would like to extend our analysis
to examine whether these relationships change in the period of 2010-2014 as well as the transitions to the third birth.

Reference
Fukuda, S. “Gender Role Division and Transition to the Second Birth in Japan” IPSS Working
Paper Series (E), No. 28. URL: http://www.ipss.go.jp/publication/e/WP/IPSS_WPE28.pdf