ABSTRACT
The low involvement of men in parenting and household work greatly hinders Japanese women from working uninterruptedly. While the share of husbands’ household work has slightly increased (Inui 2014), the disparity between women and men over sharing household work and parenting is still wide in Japan. Compared to other countries, the gender division in inequality of household work is most significant in Japan. Therefore, it can be argued that today, the Japanese society expects women to actively participate in the labour market to save the economy, bear children to maintain the population and also take up a caring role at home. In this chapter, the author investigates these social expectations for women, which he here characterize as the “working and caring” norm. This was developed based on the “traditional” gender division of labour that assigns child rearing and household work to only women and is called the “new” gender division of labour.
