Transmission of gender ideology through family discourse

Informed by the social cognitive theory of co-orientation, this qualitative study explored the impact of family and social discourse on women’s motherhood and professional identities through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 13 Japanese women born in the decade before and after the Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Law was established in 1986. Overall, the interviews revealed two lifestyle categories – semi-traditional and modern. Specifically, the interviews revealed that women in the semi-traditional and modern categories enacted some form of change in their gender ideology and that women in the modern category experienced more dialogue-based communication and equal power dynamic with their husbands compared to women in the semi-traditional category in which they experienced one-way communication and a greater power differential with husbands. Informed by the literature on cultural values, the findings from this study conclude that Japanese women’s empowerment is built not by resistance to oppression but by conquering the over-taxation.