Good girls don't get ahead? Teachers' perceptions of the gender gaps in mathematics in Japan
Keywords: Japan
teachers' perceptions
mathematics
Japanese education
gender gap

Japanese girls lag behind their male peers in mathematics according to international tests such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Japan’s position near the top of the mathematics achievement rankings masks how it also has some of the biggest gender gaps in scores and attitudes towards the subject in the world consistently. Despite this costly wastage of female talent, there is little attention paid - at any societal level - to understanding why such gaps exist or how to fix them. This research is the first to investigate this lack of response. While there is comprehensive research into how topics become problematised in Japanese society, including studies covering education (Kitsuse et al. 1984; Goodman 2012) and gender (Kinsella 2012) topics specifically, this research lends a new perspective by digging into why issues are not problematised. Answers are sought through semi-structured interviews with teachers to investigate the mechanisms behind why the gender-mathematics gaps at the school level have remained unproblematised. The main empirical contribution is that teachers do (latently) recognise genders gaps like those described by PISA and Isa and Chinen (2014), but that these disparities are obfuscated by a combination of gender role expectations, teachers being discouraged from taking a gendered perspective, and the education system’s structural features. This effect is exacerbated by there being little societal discussion, largely due to the topic being considered ‘taboo’. The dichotomous STEM/Humanities track system, a major structural element of schooling in Japan which results in few girls choosing to continue study mathematics in high school and beyond, also affects teachers’ interpretation of the resulting, de facto, single sex system. The gender gaps are not viewed as a problem because they can be seen as the result of girls’ agency. Complicating this ‘choice’ narrative is a discourse of mathematics ability and interest differences between boys and girls as inherent and natural: good girls work hard at mathematics, but boys are talented at it and are expected to outperform them. Even when girls do better in classwork and tests, many teachers feel this does not correspond to being good at mathematics itself, explaining that girls have a shallower understanding and struggle to apply knowledge to unfamiliar questions. Therefore, the common features of problematised issues in Japan - perceptions of unfairness; social undesirability and abnormality; and the resulting widespread public debate – are not present here. Good, hardworking girls making a free choice not to study mathematics is not a ‘problem’, especially as they tend not to possess the raw talent that boys do. However, many teachers did feel that the gender gaps were problematic and should be fixed but had not thought about the issue before their interviews. A frequent comment was that they had never heard of, or engaged in, any discussion of the topic before. This thesis highlights how, although other countries have problematised much smaller educational gender disparities, Japan seems, at least on the surface, unmoved. This thesis provides an overview of the current barriers to problematisation that policymakers will need to overcome to fix Japan’s gender gap: helping girls (and the Japanese economy) reach their full potential.