Measuring Gender Role Attitudes in Japan

Abstract

What explains gender discrimination in Japan? While Japan ranks near the worst among advanced democracies in nearly all cross-national gender equality rankings, we know little about the attitudes that drive disparate outcomes between men and women. To address this need, the authors develop, introduce, and validate the first measure of gender role attitudes in Japan, the Gender Role Scale. Using data from a large, national, quota-based sample of 2,389 Japanese conducted in March 2020, the authors visualize the subcomponents of Gender Role Scale, showing cross-gender differences in attitudes. The findings extend the large literature on politics and gender and provide a measure for reuse in Japan and for extension to other countries that lag behind in women’s empowerment.

What explains gender discrimination in Japan? While Japan ranks near the worst among advanced democracies in nearly all cross-national gender equality rankings, we know little about the attitudes that drive disparate outcomes between men and women. To address this need, we develop and introduce here the first measure of gender role attitudes in Japan, the Gender Role Scale (GRS). The scale involves eight questions, based on history and anecdote, that respondents answer on a five-point scale that ranges from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Higher agreement theoretically captures greater congruence with traditional gender norms (i.e., more conservative beliefs). We validate this scale using data from a large, national, quota-based sample of 2,389 Japanese conducted with Nikkei Research from March 25 to 30, 2020. On the basis of these data, we find that the questions have high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.79), indicating that they are closely related to one another and capture a similar underlying construct. We provide additional tests of the measure’s construct validity in the Supplementary Information, along with full details about the survey and the instrument and more information about our analytical choices. This study was approved by the institutional review board at Dartmouth College.

Findings

To further assess the validity of our measure, we conduct a differential-groups study and visualize the components of the GRS in Figure 1 for men and women. In line with naive expectations, we show in Figure 1 that men exhibit higher levels of agreement across all eight items. These differences are statistically significant (p < .05) and substantively meaningful, equal to between one quarter and one third of a standard deviation. These findings provide additional support for the construct validity of our scale and also highlight key gender differences in how Japanese perceive the role of women in society and work: Japanese men show much more traditional attitudes to women’s roles.

Figure 1.

Japanese men exhibit more conservative attitudes on the Gender Role Scale.

Discussion

In Japan, men and women experience extremely unequal outcomes in many aspects of society and work. Surprisingly, we know little about the attitudes that underlie these differences. Here we introduce a new measurement scale, the GRS, that can be used to document these attitudes and better understand their influence on other attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes. We show that men demonstrate much more conservative attitudes than women, and one promising direction for future work would be to examine both their drivers and consequences.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211057719 – Supplemental material for Measuring Gender Role Attitudes in Japan

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211057719 for Measuring Gender Role Attitudes in Japan by Charles Crabtree and Kiho Muroga in Socius