The work, family and care nexus in Paris and Tokyo: Gender equality and well-being among urban professionals

ABSTRACT

Based on 51 qualitative interviews of middle- to upper-middle-class women and men in their thirties through early fifties in Paris and Tokyo from 2018 to 2020, this qualitative research seeks to develop a comparative understanding of how women and men reconcile the diverse commitments of work and family in two post-industrial societies by querying such topics as the contexts for dual-career households, the meanings of work for women and men, workplace challenges, and gender and the division of household labor. Recent shifts in gender roles, female workforce participation, and more varied living patterns and couple relationships are increasingly placing pressure on younger and middle-aged couples with children. Our findings suggest that despite historical and cultural differences in the nexus of work and family, not to mention diverging levels of government support for dual-worker families, there are interesting commonalities in the ways in which couples reconcile work and family. In particular, in both Japan and France, naturalizing women as the main care givers is a fundamental aspect of how work and family balance is maintained. Despite the presence of many supportive institutional frameworks for flexible work, childcare support, and gender equity, both the French and the Japanese pursue subjective well-being through gendered notions of care.

KEYWORDS:

• gender equality; Japan; France; family; well-being

Introduction

This article explores how middle-class dual income couples of Paris and Tokyo view the issues of work and family care, and how they negotiate these issues in their daily lives. We focus on the couples’ motivations to work and their means of accomplishing their goals of work and family care along with obstacles they encounter, and how gender matters in terms of the division of household labor as well as the desire to be the main care-giver or breadwinner.

As both authors are scholars of Japanese society, we are especially interested in how cases from a French metropolis could shed light on Japan’s context of work and family care. Japan is among the most rapidly aging societies in the world, whose population is forecasted to shrink from 126 million to 98 million by 2060, due to aging as well as a low birthrate, less marriage, and late marriage (Retherford et al., 2004). It has experienced a difficult economy for three decades, and it is still struggling. In a bid to increase the numbers of people in the labor force, the central government has tried to call women as well as the young retirees out of the domestic sphere and retirement, respectively, but as we will discuss in this paper, there are many institutional issues as well as cultural norms that make this an uphill battle. Japan has also made important steps on the road toward gender equality, instituting the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1986 and the Basic Law on Gender Equality in 1999 (e-gov, accessed 15 December 2020). France makes an interesting comparison because it is a country where familialism has been an explicit part of government policy since the early 20^th century, while feminism has been brought into public policy since the1960s (Revillard, 2006). Furthermore, middle-class women have had a strong continuous presence in the labor force for over a generation now. Importantly, both countries are experiencing falling birthrates, but France, whose total fertility rate hovers around 1.8 (OECD, 2020), has met with some success at stemming the decline in recent decades – more success than any other EU country. The opportunity to perform a comparative study in France, where the goals of dual careers with children in a gender equitable environment seem to be achievable, was enticing.

Demographically, France, with a population of over 65 million, is admittedly a smaller-scale nation than is Japan with a population of over 126 million, but it is much larger than the Scandinavian countries with which Japan is often compared in family policy studies (Takahashi, 2003, 2011). We chose to compare Japan with a country that is not the “go-to” model of a gender-equal society, yet where it is normative for women to be employed throughout their lives and have families. And while Japan’s level of social welfare investment is nowhere near that of France, Japan does have national health insurance, a national pension system, maternity and paternity leaves, public daycare, a long-term care insurance program for the elderly, unemployment insurance scheme, etc.¹ Hence, it is relevant to compare Japan with France in the context of the work, family, and care nexus.

Families in post-industrial societies have faced the challenge of how to manage both work and family life, specifically for dual career couples, in a way that at least maintains and at best enhances the relationships they hold meaningful in each sphere. This problem of what has been termed “work-life balance” is common in all post-industrial societies where both women and men participate fully in the paid labor force while also forming personal relationships that often lead to family formation, and hence responsibilities for children and the household. Since the 1990s, researchers have pointed out many problems inherent in the family, work, and care nexus, including the ways in which the institution of employment itself obstructs gender equality (Folbre, 1994), and the issue of women’s unpaid “second shift” of domestic labor (Drew et al., 1998; Hochschild, 1989). Hochschild (1997) also explored the problems US workers faced as work became a haven from home when the time demands of work accumulated to the point where the domestic sphere became unmanageable. More recently, the gaps between rights through legal frameworks and the capabilities of workers to access these rights to balance their work and care has been explored by Hobson (2014). Yet, we regard the question of “balance” as very much a subjective question; my “balance” may be my partner’s misery, or my boss’ nightmare. Access to “family-friendly” policies is often granted to those whom employers deem the worthiest, or unwritten social norms limit access by gender. As well, irregular workers are often left out (Nemoto, 2016; Roberts, 2005; Takahashi et al., 2014).

We find the framework of subjective well-being to be efficacious in unpacking the concerns, motivations, and actions of participants in our study. As Mathews and Izkierdo note, “Well-being is experienced by individuals – its essential locus lies within individual subjectivity – but it may be considered interpersonally and interculturally, since all individuals live within particular worlds of others, and all societies live in a common world at large” (Mathews & Izkierdo, 2009, p. 5). Hence in this qualitative study we look to find how individuals and couples seek to attain well-being within the institutional frameworks and the (continually changing) socio-cultural norms of their respective societies.

To our knowledge, this is the first qualitative study to compare the work, family, and care nexus in these two societies. While investigations of the meso-level where policy meets with reality is certainly of merit, our study instead focuses on the micro-level, inquiring how individuals negotiate and evaluate their circumstances.²

Methodology

Using a snowball sampling method, we carried out 29 interviews (16 women, 13 men) in Paris with middle- to upper-middle-class parents as well as with two educators, one in a daycare center and one in an elementary school, from January through May 2018. Four of the interviews were with couples, whom we interviewed separately. One woman was divorced, and two had separated. Twenty-seven in our sample of parents have been living together in some sort of relationship. They ranged in age from 29 to 52, born in the period 1966–1988. Eight people were of migrant background, having come from Poland, Togo, Nigeria, Comoros, Algeria (four), Romania (two), and Vietnam. Four had one child, 12 had two children, 12 had three, and one had five. Almost all interviewees were highly educated, in the mid- to upper-middle-income brackets.³ Many of our informants could speak English, but for those who spoke only French or a mixture of French and English, we employed two graduate students to assist us with interpretation. The interviews were open-ended and focused mainly on daily schedules, the household division of labor, motivations to work, the workplace environment, interactions with extended family, childbearing and rearing, personal time and couple time, utilization of government services, and hopes for their family in the future.

In Japan, using snowball sampling, we carried out interviews with 22 people (13 men and nine women) in Japan in two waves from the summer of 2019 to early February 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic.⁴ Our sample included two couples. Participants ranged in age from 31 to 55. Four had three children, 11 had two, and seven had one child. Most interviewees had at least a bachelor’s degree. Nine had master’s degrees, and all were middle- to upper-income families.⁵ The interviews were conducted in Japanese except in a few cases where the informants wanted to speak in English.

In both countries, the duration of the interviews was from one to two hours. In Paris, we often interviewed in people’s homes, which afforded us a chance to understand more about daily life by viewing the neighborhood and occasionally meeting the children as well. In Tokyo, following urban social etiquette in Japan, the interviews were always in coffee shops or offices or in the common room of the interviewee’s apartment complex.

Background: Family, Work, and Care

For a better understanding of the context of the present study, we will here provide a brief summary of the post-WWII history of the work/family nexus in both societies.

Japan

Japanese women’s labor force participation was high before WWII. Women worked in family businesses, agriculture, manufacturing, and as domestic servants. While the ideal for women of “good wife, wise mother” had been propagated throughout the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taisho (1912–1926) eras, it was not until well into the post-war Showa (1926–1989) era that many families had the wherewithal to afford the male-breadwinner/professional-housewife family model. Even then, it remained a sign of distinction (Kondo, 1990). Thanks to double-digit growth in the 1960s and early 1970s, this model became firmly established in the society, where the majority of the populace identified themselves as middle-class, and the male corporate-warrior/female professional-housewife norm was supported by the tax system (Osawa, 2002; Rosenberger, 1991). Indeed, starting in 1985, women married to salaried men working for large firms could obtain their own government pension after their spouse’s retirement, without them or their husbands making any extra contributions, and in 1986, a tax deduction was implemented for those with dependent spouses (Ochiai, 2011, p. 232). Ochiai explains these reforms as the government’s efforts to “protect the Japanese family” against trends seen in the West, such as increasing divorces, later ages of marriage, and decreasing birthrates (Ochiai, 2011).

Over the course of the post-war period, Japanese women’s labor-force participation formed an “M-curve,” illustrating the pattern of work after leaving school, peaking before marriage, and a downward turn during the childbirth and child-rearing years, and then a second, lower peak in employment after the last child was in school, followed by a gradual decline to retirement. The employment at the second peak was characterized by irregular, low-waged jobs, often as part-time workers. Hence, women fulfilled the care needs of their households as well as capital’s need for cheap, disposable labor in Japan’s internal labor market. Male breadwinners were favored with core jobs, and female workers were treated as expendable. The point we wish to emphasize here is that the position of housewife in the society was and remains valorized in the tax code and in society, notwithstanding recent moderate changes (Brasor & Tsubuku, 2019). Housewives do have decision-making power and often control the household finances. While public opinion is changing toward approval of dual-worker households, women’s primary role in the household is still given importance (Goldstein-Gidoni, 2017). Furthermore, mothers in Japan are not likely to be employed full-time. A survey of 4,000 mothers and fathers with at least one child under the age of six showed that 61% of the women were full-time mothers, with only 8% in full-time employment (Nagase, 2018).

One reason that so few women carry on full-time, regular employment throughout their lives is that Japan’s labor market is internal and still largely based on age and seniority wages. Career hiring generally occurs once a year, immediately after graduating; employees often spend their entire careers within one company (Waldenberger, 2016). If one quits one’s regular employment, it is difficult to find another comparable job, especially after having children and with age. Women, due to marriage and childbirth, are more likely than men to exit the labor force for periods of time and have difficulty re-entering on the same footing. Men, too, face difficulties finding decent regular employment if they failed to obtain a regular post from the start (Kojima, 2015). In addition, there is little opportunity for adult education in the sense of re-training for a different career, since in-house company training is the mode of upward mobility. Motherhood, too, is considered to be an all-encompassing role of devotion and self-sacrifice (Aono & Kashiwagi, 2011). In Japan, as in other East Asian societies, marriage remains the only socially legitimate family institution within which children are welcomed (Hertog, 2009; Roberts, 2016). Extra-marital births make up only about 2% of all births (OECD, 2018). While an increasing number of local governments and companies have given some minimal recognition of lesbian and gay partnerships, Japanese family law recognizes only heterosexual marriage as a legitimate institution (Ueno, 2000).

Yet at the same time, alternative choices for women’s lifestyles have emerged. In 1986, the Japanese government, under international pressure to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Law. While it did not make huge inroads in gendered business practices, it was a significant start. It was revised and strengthened over the years, and one of the outcomes of the legislation is the growing share of women in managerial positions, attaining 13% in 2020. This attests to the rising number of women who are working increasingly long years of service in their firms (OECD, 2019, p. 6).

The model of the male breadwinner and professional housewife has increasingly eroded since Japan’s economic bubble burst in 1991. The economy was only beginning to recover when it was hit by the global economic crisis of 2008. It is not only the poor economy that has caused the huge demographic shifts (later marriage, less marriage, very low birthrates) that Japan has seen in the past thirty years, however. Women have become more educated, exposed to Western notions of gender equality, and increasingly look for more out of life than becoming wives and mothers.

Meanwhile, the Japanese state, desirous of boosting birthrates as well as shoring up pension contributions and productivity, has gradually improved the legal environment for work and family balance. The Labor Standards Law of 1947 provides maternity leave of six weeks before and eight weeks after birth (roudou.net, accessed 7/19/2020). Childcare time in the workplace of two periods of 30 minutes per day is also mandated, although in practice this is often taken as one hour per day, allowing mothers to leave work early. The implementation of the Childcare and Eldercare Leave Law in 1991, and its subsequent revisions over the years, increased the percent of income paid through labor insurance as well as the amount of time one can take per leave, currently at a maximum of two years if a daycare space cannot be obtained (MHLW, 2020a), paid by social insurance at 67% of one’s salary (MHLW, 2020b). In addition, childcare leave is gender neutral. Men can avail themselves of the leave even if their wives are at home. Yet, the current uptake of childcare leave by men stands at 6.16% of eligible men, while over 80% of eligible women take childcare leave.⁶ When we look at the amount of unpaid household work by women and men in Japan in 2015, women’s daily load averages 3 hours 44 minutes, while men’s is 41 minutes. Furthermore, while high-quality, affordable public daycare has been mandated in Japan since 1947, there is insufficient quantity in urban areas to accommodate all the families who wish to use it. Although the years since 1995 have seen several renditions of “Angel Plans” to fund more daycare centers, there are still long waiting lists in many urban areas, especially Tokyo.⁷ Between 2010 and 2014, of women who were working before pregnancy, 46.9% quit upon childbirth, while 53.1% continued their employment (Government of Japan, Gender Equality Bureau, Cabinet Office, 2020). The birthrate, at 1.4, is among the lowest in the OECD (OECD, 2020).

The number of dual-worker households in Japan surpassed the number of full-time housewife/male-breadwinner households in the 1990s, but over half of women in 2018 were in irregular or part-time employment. Ultimately, government efforts to encourage families to have more children by the implementation of various work and family balance reconciliation schemes have proven unsuccessful. Furthermore, Takahashi et al. report that women easily assume the burden of household care because in Japan, being a fulltime homemaker is still seen as acceptable: “… the social norm that family life is a woman’s responsibility remains unchallenged” (Takahashi et al., 2014, pp. 98–99).

The standard work week in Japan is 40 hours. However, employees in regular, full-time white-collar employment also often have long hours of unpaid overtime. Although in recent years the government has recognized this problem and sought to ameliorate it, long hours remain endemic for many workers (Kojima et al., 2017). Gordon (2009) indicates that over the course of the post-war period, while Japanese workers gained in terms of wages and equality among blue and white collars, they gave up fighting for quality-of-life conditions, such as shorter hours, longer vacations, or right to refuse transfer. The standard vacations are the summer obon (ancestral days) holidays, which last about a week, and New Year’s holidays, also about a week. There are also national holidays scattered throughout the year, making long weekends. Until COVID-19 hit, most workers in Japan were office-based. Sato (2013) reported that telecommuting was an official option at only a few companies. In general, Japanese employment is not very flexible for regular employees, who are expected to be the core constituents of the firm. The pandemic greatly increased the number of tele-workers, but it is too early to know whether this will cause a permanent change in the nation’s workstyle.

France

As Anne Revillard discusses, while French women have a high rate of labor force participation, they also hold a strong state-led familialist ideology, which she labels “The French paradox” (Revillard, 2006, p. 134). Due to that interesting mix, French women – mostly working-class – were considered “citizen producers” and were subject to protective legislation in the labor law of the early 20^th century (Revillard, 2006, p. 136). In addition, provisions for early childcare were also developed as part of secular, anti-Catholic republicanism. The result was an environment that helped women combine childcare and employment (Revillard, 2006, p. 137).

In Paris in the early post-WWII era, for the middle classes, the male-breadwinner model was common, and marriage was the norm for adult men and women. As in other Western countries at the time, few middle-class women worked outside the home after marriage (Fagnani, 2010). France was a largely Roman Catholic society with conservative family values marked by the rites and rhythms of the faith (baptism, communion, marriage, and funerals) (Dupont, 2017, p. 30). Middle-class women were wives and mothers foremost; few were professionals. Unlike in Japan, women did not hold the family purse. Marriage was above all a social contract offering stability and security, not an institution within which one could seek personal development and mutual care.

Secularization proceeded apace over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, however, and the women’s movement in the late 1960s hastened change. In 1975, divorce by mutual consent was instituted (De Singly, 2014). Marriages in Catholic churches sharply decreased between 1950 and 2010, from 80% of all civil marriages to 29% (Dupont, 2017, p. 30). Women’s educational levels and their participation in the labor force rose steadily.

In 1978, the government rescinded the “single salary allowance” for families with male-only breadwinners. Urban middle classes demanded government daycare centers, supported by the women’s movement. There was also a significant labor shortage, and the demand for well-educated women in the tertiary sector rose (Fagnani, 2010, p. 390). At the same time, the legal environment for equality between the sexes strengthened beginning in 1968. Left-wing and feminist unionists fought for equality in salary and for the professional promotion of women. In 1981, President François Mitterand created a ministerial post for women’s rights, and the law for equality in employment was passed in 1983 (Bard, 2004, p. 231). By the 1980s it had become the norm for French women to work outside the home throughout their life course.

Dupont (2017, pp. 44–45) relates that, while the hierarchical, authoritarian, and patriarchal traditional family of France’s past was denounced in the 1960s and 70s, the family itself was not denounced, but rather the family circle was perceived and lived increasingly “as a warm place, rich in affection and authentic sharing,” which the sociologist Francois de Singly (2017, p. 13) called “the relational family.”⁸ In fact, a European values survey found that 86% of the French respondents chose family as their most important domain of life, over work, friends, or hobbies (Dupont, 2017, p. 45).

While family is held in high regard, the forms of partnership therein have proliferated in recent decades. In addition to civil marriage and religious marriage, concubinage and Pacsé (or PACS) have become socially acceptable means of structuring a relationship.⁹ Concubinage is co-habitation, and it carries no legal formality nor obligations. Pacsé or PACS is an abbreviation for “le Pacte Civil de Solidarité,” which was created in 1999. It affords some level of protection, such as financial measures and social recognition, to partners (including same-sex partners) in a relationship other than marriage. All these forms of partnership may also include children, who indeed are more often than not born outside of formal marriage: in 2020, such births accounted for 62.2% of all births, up from 37.2% in 1994 (Insée, 2020). Taken together, the family in France is no longer structured exclusively around marriage (Dupont, 2017, p. 38, citing Théry, 1993). By legitimizing a plurality of forms of partnership, one could argue the State has removed some of the pressure on individuals to conform to a narrow definition of family, and importantly this gives various forms of family access to State social support.

De Singly notes that the values underlying the family have transformed toward an emphasis on individual fulfillment (De Singly, 2017). In his words, “the contemporary family is defined less according to formal, structural criteria than by reference to a double requirement: the creation of a living environment wherein everyone can develop while taking part in living together and supporting others” (De Singly, 2017, pp. 9–10).

In terms of childcare options, during the 1970s, the government introduced the Family Allowance Fund (CAF), built more crèches (daycare facilities), and provided leisure centers (centre de loisirs) with onsite cafeterias to watch over children after school and when there are no lessons (such as Wednesday afternoons and holidays). By the 1980s, 99% of children aged three to six were being cared for in nursery schools (école maternelle) (Fagnani, 2010, p. 390).

Migration from Italy, Spain, and Portugal as well as from France’s former colonies into France proper also increased, providing a pool of domestic workers who were often hired as caregivers and for other household tasks. Tax breaks for childcare arrangements such as nannies (nounou) and registered childminders (guarde maternelle) have been provided since 1994 (Fagnani, 2010, p. 391). This aimed to increase employment for migrants as well as fill the need for caregivers in urban areas where migrants tended to be located so that more women could go out to work.¹⁰ Importantly, the public response to this ample regime of daycare services has been extremely positive. In relation to the daycares and other public services, Fagnani notes, “The early socialization this provides is additionally held in high esteem, particularly by the educated middle classes …” (Fagnani, 2010, p. 399).¹¹ In addition, cultural enrichment such as music or dance lessons are publicly funded, at minimal charge on a sliding-fee scale, while the costs of university education are minimal at most institutions.

While all this assistance to families was being established, in 1994 the French government allowed benefits to be paid to those parents who ceased to work or who changed to part-time work until the child reached the age of three (and hence could attend the école maternelle). Although either parent could avail themselves of this law, 98% of those who took the flat-rate benefit were women, illustrating the widely held notion that the rearing of young children is the mother’s responsibility (Fagnani, 2010, p. 394). Beyond Fagnani’s observation, we surmise, too, that income differences between the two parents also contributed to it being mothers who took this benefit. Yet, as a sign of changing social conditions and attitudes, paternity leave, which was afforded starting in 1984 under a socialist government, was extended from three to eleven days in 2002 and then to 28 days, of which seven are mandatory, from mid-2021 (Peltier, 2020). According to Fagnani and Math (2009), two-thirds of eligible fathers took paternity leave in 2003.¹²

Another outstanding feature of the work/family nexus in France is its work week, which was reduced from 39 hours to 35 hours by two laws in 1998 and 2000 (Fagnani & Letablier, 2004). The law was implemented to reduce the high level of unemployment at the time, but also out of concerns for “family parity and a more equal sharing of paid and unpaid work” (Fagnani & Letablier, 2004, p. 553). Hours beyond this must be remunerated with rest days or overtime pay (Triplet & Associés, accessed 6 December 2020). While white-collar professional workers tend to work much longer than 35-hour weeks, this law has helped some women we interviewed negotiate for taking half-days off on a regular basis. Furthermore, as of 2017, the Labor Code was amended to make it a right for employees to request remote working (see Ducorps-Prouvost, 2017).

Apart from the short work week, the French also enjoy numerous vacations, which they fully utilize. School vacations are frequent, with four vacations lasting two weeks every two months during the school year plus two months of summer vacation. During school holidays, children usually spend time visiting their grandparents for at least part of the period. Also, the after-school care programs remain open all day long during holidays, so if the parents need to work, they can keep the children there for a reasonable fee. These are also available for all working days during school holidays.

France’s policy initiatives did much to support women’s advancement within the labor force. Indeed, in France in 2010, over 50% of women with three or more children were employed (those aged 25–49 with the youngest child under age six). This was significantly higher than the EU average of 45.9% (Cour des Comptes, 2013, p. 21). In 2017, 67.3% of women living in a couple relationship with children were employed full-time. Women’s share of managerial positions is about 34%, which is in the mid-range for OECD countries (OECD, 2019, p. 6).

It is now a given in French society that a woman will work throughout her childbearing years, but there remains a division of labor by sex in the household. Although men’s share of household labor¹³ has increased over the decades, it was still only 26.5% for married couples and 28% for co-habiting couples in 2009–2010 (Kandil & Périvier, 2017, p. 26). A large-scale social survey in 2005 found that 10% of households were hiring someone to perform housework, with the wealthiest and those most highly educated being proportionately more likely to hire household help (Bauer, 2015, p. 182).

The picture we see in France is of strong government support for natality, for early childhood health, education, and group socialization, and for dual-worker families. Family policies with their pro-natality emphasis have been successful in shoring up the birthrate: currently, France’s total fertility rate is 1.8, which is the highest in the EU (OECD, 2020). At the same time, Fagnani (2010, p. 392) points out that, overall, French policy is a “working mother model.” in other words, women and men do not equally share work and family duties. While it is a “working mother model,” we found that it enabled the middle-class women to work full-time or almost full-time with normal, not part-time, wages.

Meanings of Paid Employment

As we have seen, France transitioned from the male-breadwinner family to a dual earner household norm in the last quarter of the 20^th century, while for Japan, this transition has not taken place, especially if we speak of full-time, regular employment for women throughout the life course. Nearly all the people in our study are engaged in full-time employment, although the meaning of “full-time” differs in the two locations.

As Neil Thin observed, “Studies of work are inadequate if they do not represent the affective and meaningful dimensions of the quality of working life” (Thin, 2009, p. 40). To understand the subjective well-being of these families, we need to know why they do what they do, beyond economic motives. In the following subsections, we consider the meanings of paid employment through our informants’ narratives, including how work appeared as a processual choice for women, partners’ views of wives’ employment, the meanings of employment for Tokyo men, and workplace challenges.¹⁴

Tokyo

Work as a processual choice for Japanese women

The decision to stay on at work after childbirth was often part of, in Sally Moore’s (1978, p. 46) approach, a process, not a one-off, sudden choice. It was a part of a “situational adjustment” hailing a change in social norms (Moore, 1978, p. 48). Mrs. Takahara, age 48, with a secretarial-track job for a large firm, is a case in point. When she was young, she thought she would quit work upon marrying and keep house herself, having a life “at her own pace.” She married, but she continued to work. She had a baby at age 35. Then, she had doubts about whether to continue after their child was born. The baby was a lot of work. But she thought that if she quit, she would have nothing left. She would miss the “ties with society,” she said. And, she noted, dual-career couples have increased. Furthermore, her husband encouraged her by saying, “Why don’t you keep working?” He said her career would be a waste if she quit, which is an attitude more commonly associated with younger generations. Her younger sister also agreed with that. Here we see that the decision to stay on at work was processual, a gradual change of mind toward a new social pattern of continuing one’s employment despite marriage and childbirth. We can see that Mrs. Takahara was convinced to continue through the encouragement of family but also by the surrounding environment where there are now more dual-career couples. The decision was based on her family’s encouragement, others’ new behaviors, and her own subjective well-being – she “would have nothing left” if she quit.

Other informants noted that their work has a self-enhancing quality that they found necessary to sustain themselves. This, too, is a new development for Japanese women and a sign of their individualization. Mrs. Sawada, age 34, noted:

After having a child, I realized for the first time that I live for performing in the outside world and being acknowledged for that. My parents were over-protective of me, so I thought I couldn’t do a single thing, but because I gave birth, I realized I was wrong. Childrearing is creative, too, and really interesting, but maybe I like communicating with the outside world. I was doing graphic art, so I guess I expressed myself that way. And after I gave birth, I recognized that [talent] again. ‘Okay, if I don’t work, I can’t maintain my sanity. If I don’t express myself, I can’t be myself.’ That’s how I thought, I absolutely couldn’t cut off working from myself, so I’ve always continued working …

Another woman for whom the realization of the importance of employment came gradually was Mrs. Samejima,¹⁵ a Chief Executive Officer at a top consulting firm. She had an epiphany during her first marriage after she quit her employment to follow her then-husband abroad for his job transfer in the late 1990s. This is not an unusual path to take; although some firms now allow employees to take a leave of absence during spousal transfers, most firms do not. Furthermore, there is pressure from the spouse’s firm (that is, the husband’s firm) to quit employment and accompany him (Kurotani, 2005). Once she arrived overseas, however, Mrs. Samejima found herself feeling unmoored:

S¹⁶: As you would think, when I quit work to go to the US, it felt as if I had lost my identity. I couldn’t even make a contract with the gas or the electric company; it had to be in my husband’s name … and I had to depend on him entirely for money since I had quit working. That was much more painful for me than I had anticipated … Even just going to the supermarket, I would get a receipt and give it to my husband. While living that kind of life, I started to feel incompetent.

G¹⁷: But, usually don’t people get a certain amount from their husbands every month?

S: Ah, yes, but at that time it wasn’t like that. I would just get a little bit each time I needed it, a little bit each time, so it really felt like a humiliation.

She left her husband in the US and returned to Tokyo, where, to her surprise, her company took her back as a full-time regular employee. She and her then-husband ended up divorcing, but the experience left her with a strong understanding that work was very much a part of her identity, and we surmise, essential to her sense of well-being.

Partner’s views of wives’ employment

All these women discovered the desire to continue in employment throughout their adult years, but in their generation, it was still very common for well-educated women to quit employment upon marriage (Yu, 2009). Although most Japanese men of the current younger generation desire their wives to work at least part-time (Fankhauser et al., 2018), for older generations of men, the breadwinner/homemaker model was the norm – this is why Mrs. Samejima, above, quit her first job to follow her first husband, and why another interviewee, Mrs. Arima, met the disapproval of her husband and his family when she wanted to continue working after childbirth. Opinions on wives’ work from the Tokyo interviews, however, were mixed. For instance, Mrs. Sawada, when discussing her husband’s attitude toward her employment, said:

He never told me not to work nor did he ever tell me not to put the child in daycare. He just said that if the child is not in daycare, I couldn’t work. He thinks that he should not take away from me my ‘toy,’ my indulgence, that makes me lively and happy; it’s the way I let off steam. About 80% of me is made out of my work. Because sometimes things I’ve really wanted to try doing, I’ve made them into my work … also probably from my husband’s perspective, I’m very alive.

While Mrs. Sawada’s spouse saw her employment as an indulgence, in contrast, another interviewee saw his wife’s employment as a high-income earner in media as what gave her a personal identity as distinct from her family role. Mr. Nohara, aged 55, whose wife was a well-paid executive, saw his wife’s job as her connection to society. As he put it:

It’s important that my wife has a relation to society as a working individual. I think it’s necessary for her to be independent, both the economic part and also that she can use her discretion to do many things. And she can take responsibility for her work … I guess independence means that you have your own identity as a distinct person. If she didn’t work, wouldn’t she only be so-and-so’s mommy?

Yet someone else understood his wife’s employment as an inconvenient (and perhaps frivolous) lifestyle choice. When asked how he felt about leaving his four-month-old baby with a babysitter, Mr. Tauchi (44) related his understanding of his wife’s desire to keep working. He said:

I wasn’t worried about it. Well, I can’t say I wasn’t worried at all, but more than being worried, I just felt that there was nothing to be done about it. She isn’t working for income; it might sound strange to say it was her style or her way of life, but it’s because she wanted to work. If we’d had to hire a sitter five days a week it might have been another story, but just hiring a sitter once a week, I felt that was the way it had to be (shōganaina to; nothing could be done about it).¹⁸

Here we can see Mr. Tauchi’s male-breadwinner attitude surfacing. To him, his wife’s work is not central to the family economy and, in fact, necessitates expenditures on caregivers, while his own work is a given.

Yet there are also men who see their wife's employment as similar to their own. For instance, Mr. Samejima appreciated how important his wife’s work was to her; he married her because of her passion for work. She is a top executive at her firm and has longer hours than he does. In another case, Mr. Omori, whose wife is on the executive board at her firm, also spoke of his wife’s efforts at work as normal for a worker at that level. He did not speak of her work as a pastime or as affording her an alternate role. Mr. Sekiguchi, who met his wife when they worked at a government office, also saw his wife’s work as a normal part of their life together. They had both changed jobs a few times. After having two children and with a third on the way, his wife was now at a new, regular position in an IT consulting firm. He sounded confident that she would do well there. At the end of their work life, he hoped they could someday retire early and live freely, going around to foreign countries to live as he had seen Europeans doing in his previous job.

As evidenced in the above narratives, the men we interviewed in Tokyo held a variety of notions about their wives’ employment, ranging from viewing it as almost frivolous but necessary due to the wife’s strong desire, to seeing it as essential for their wife’s and the family’s wellbeing. This may well be a reflection of the uneven transition from the breadwinner/housewife division of labor to one that recognizes role sharing and individuality. In the midst of this transition, how did the men view their own working lives?

Meanings of work for Tokyo men

The men in Tokyo, like the men in Paris discussed below, took their work seriously. They generally worked longer hours at it, however, and had fewer vacations, as we will discuss below. When we asked one of our informants what work meant to him, Mr. Tauchi said:

Why do men work? I wonder what it is. It’s not that we enjoy it so much … it may be my personality, but I feel interest, responsibility, and purpose in being relied upon by others, and that’s why I do it. If I didn’t have that, well, I’d be in trouble if my income were zero, but I wouldn’t work so hard if I didn’t feel that interest, that sense of purpose.

A similar sense of mission was mentioned by Mr. Hamada, who works for a public utility. He returns home from his post at a utilities company most weeknights at 10 pm, by which time his wife and child are asleep. He also told us that he uses only a quarter of his paid holidays. When we asked him why, whether it was because work is the most important thing in his life, he replied:

No, it’s not because work is the most important thing in my life, but from the point of view of responsibility, as a manager, if something happens, I have the mindset to take responsibility … and when that might happen, one never knows. Utilities are a lifeline [for people], so it’s better to be there … my wife does take holidays off, and she looks at me coldly.

Dasgupta (2016, p. 161) argues that the core assumptions of what he calls “salaryman masculinity” “such as the work/masculinity nexus and the expectations of the man as a heterosexual reproducer, have not altered significantly.” We can see from Mr. Hamada’s comments that his sense of duty to the firm as well as commitment to the customers compelled his long days at work. Indeed, it was quite common for men to take fewer than half of their paid holidays, though women tended to make use of them more, often taking them to nurse sick children.

In contrast to this dominant gender norm among older generations, other, younger men gave us a different kind of reasoning. For instance, Mr. Sekiguchi, whom we mentioned above, worked in a highly prized position as a national-level bureaucrat upon graduating from university. He ended up quitting that job and entering a position in educational administration because he disliked the strict hierarchy, lack of flexibility, and the exceptionally long hours of his work. He said it did not suit either his personality or his family circumstances with two young children. Since our sample is small, we cannot know whether Mr. Sekiguchi represents a trend toward being more of a family man – ikumen¹⁹ – or not.

While work is a passion for some men, it no longer necessarily means work in the same company in life-time employment. Like Mr. Sekiguchi, Mr. Samejima also changed his firm. In fact, he has changed jobs several times over his career, working for both Japanese and foreign-capital firms. He obtained an MBA from abroad. He explained his job changes as driven by his desire to follow his passion to be a “game-changer” in the way the Japanese do business. After his child was born, he made sure to make it clear to his future employer that he had responsibilities at home for her; he would not be staying late to do overtime. The employer recognized Mr. Samejima’s expertise and hired him even though his demand was unusual. Future research should determine if such men represent a shift in the way Japanese men think about the employment and family nexus of responsibility.

Workplace challenges in Tokyo

The literature amply illustrates widespread problems of harassment or dismissal over pregnancy, childcare leave, and promotion in Japan, despite legal frameworks (see Nemoto, 2016; Roberts, 2020). Such issues did not come up in our limited sample, except in two cases. Mrs. Ohmatsu faced harassment from a difficult boss in her foreign-capital firm when she returned to work after five months’ childcare leave. Her boss, a single woman, divorced with no children, and older than Mrs. Ohmatsu, told her she would have to go to a different department if she wanted to keep working. Mrs. Ohmatsu noted that the woman was famous for harassing married women. She complained to the human resources department, to no avail. She had to secure a new position in the firm, only two months after she returned from childcare leave.²⁰ In addition, another informant was let go when she became pregnant while working for a small documentary filmmaker.

Many women in our Tokyo sample had jobs with large firms, where it is now commonplace for women to take leave and return to work, or they were public sector employees, where taking childcare leave is also well established, or they were self-employed, deciding their own schedules.

Paris

Parisian Women: Work as a given

Some of the women we interviewed in Paris had made use of flexible work policies that allowed them to work 4.5 days per week, taking Wednesday afternoons off so as to be able to pick up their children from school and spend the afternoon with them. They were very happy to have the opportunity to spend this time with the children. But this does not mean that they were not committed as well to their careers. They were. As Germaine, age 50, with a master’s degree and working in educational administration, put it:

… I definitely will never stop working because it’s important for me to work, and I do like my work, and also because it’s important for me to be or to have the feeling that I’m independent. Both financially and feeling-wise. Because I’m not depending on my husband’s income. I don’t have to ask for, I wouldn’t like to have to ask for, uh, money to buy me something or to not be able to do something or to go on holiday somewhere … Also, because I’ve always been financially independent. I’ve always taken care of myself. I’m not sure I would like to depend on someone. I wouldn’t like this feeling.

Germaine’s independence extends to assets as well. She owns a part of their home, paying a proportional sum into the monthly mortgage. For common expenses, they have a joint bank account. Germaine prizes her personal independence and enjoys her work, so both these things motivate her to continue working.

Charlotte, age 41 and legally separated from her spouse, with five children, emphasized the feeling of

freedom that her work gives her:

… because I have always worked, I never really had time to think about ‘If I don’t work, could I stay at home with the children?’—but I’m sure that if I had not worked, I couldn’t only stay at home with the children. And why? Because I need oxygen, and I need to take time for me to be good with the children. I think it’s really difficult to spend full-time with your own children.

This liberating feeling that comes from working outside of the house was also noted by Nami, age 34, of French and Vietnamese citizenship. A marketing manager with an MA degree, Nami was staying at home since her first baby’s birth several months prior, but she was looking forward to returning to

work. She said, “ … it’s good to not be home all the time. I’m more tired being with her [the baby] than when I’m at work. It’s exhausting. And for social connections – I don’t want to be isolated. I want to see people and feel useful.” Several other women also mentioned that they were very ready to return to work after three to six months staying home with their baby.²¹

Employment is not only liberating for educated women; some women also take it for granted as a responsibility – if not to society, then to one’s status as an educated person. Danielle, a 43-year-old researcher, married with three children, noted that it is the norm for French women to be employed; the well-educated stay-at-home mother is an anomaly in society. Danielle was surprised to see highly educated women in the US who had foregone their career to play in the sandbox with their children. In her words:

In my generation, the more qualified you are, the more you work. I can see [my husband’s] cousins, his cousin has an amazing position; I mean, they don’t need any money, and the woman is traveling, killing herself at work and the mother is saying, ‘calm down,’ you know? ‘You have everything!’ and she is ‘No way!’ She is not going to quit for a second. It’s a way of thinking that is very upper class in Paris. She has nannies. And her mother was like, ‘Couldn’t you slow down a little?’ and she was, ‘No no no. I have my career!’ It’s very French … We don’t understand mothers in the playground during the week. So this was a complete new discovery to me in the US. All the mothers in the playground, in their shoes in the sand! [I would say] ‘You’re a lawyer? But wow, you’re in the sand, here and … ’ [and she would reply] ‘Yeah I know, I’ll just go back to work when I need to.’

She continued, telling us about a French friend, a mother of four with a degree from a highly prestigious university, who had an international career in business. Upon returning to France, this woman decided to go into teaching rather than continue her business career, but she was criticized for this by another French woman, who remarked, “Why is this woman doing that? Someone from [X] University should give her diploma back!” Danielle noted that this other woman was essentially saying that their mutual friend had wasted another woman’s career by quitting her prestigious position.²²

Certainly Amelie, a 36-year-old with a master’s degree and a profession in the video game industry, would agree with the notion that work was essential. She told us that her motivations to work were for financial stability, sociability, and stimulation. She also wanted to make sure that she would always be independent. She quit her first IT job because the only other working mother there was working until midnight every day, and she did not want to follow suit once her own baby was born. Hence, she was out of work for some months after her baby’s birth, and this made her very anxious. Her husband told her, “Don’t worry, I have some money, we can afford it, take your time [to find a new job].” But she was not comfortable with that. This is reminiscent of Carrie Lane’s finding that American women who became unemployed felt subjectively worse than the men in her study, because they did not want to be perceived as leaning on a man as women have long done in the past. They felt that somehow, they had failed at being an independent woman (Lane, 2011, p. 124).

Some of our male respondents also commented on the benefits of having a working wife. Tacopango, age 40, was married and had three children. His parents had migrated from Algeria, but he was born in Paris. He told us that his wife, also from a similar background, had the better job as a journalist working in media because she had gotten tertiary education. Furthermore, his wife’s job, he remarked, was something that she had wanted to do since her childhood, “with conviction.” While his job as a limousine service driver was more flexible, hers utilized her talents and afforded the family financial stability. Their children were being looked after by a relative, too, so they were not at all worried about the quality of care they were receiving.

In summary, the French middle- and upper-middle-class women we interviewed valued their jobs as their source of personal and financial independence, for liberation, for intellectual stimulation and sociability, and for the social contribution. We asked them whether they had any doubts about going back to work after their babies were born. Although a few of them said they were a bit worried because the baby was so small or because the baby cried at first until they became accustomed to the daycare arrangement, or because they worried that the nanny would not give the child the same attention that they themselves had given them, none of them indicated any regret at returning to employment after the children’s births. In contrast, not returning to work would have been the action that needed justification. The narrative of Bè, an IT manager with two children, ages four and nine months, is apt:

Well, me, I didn’t like my first maternity leave. I was alone at home with my baby. That was very difficult. And I thought, ‘How brave they are, the housewives!’ Me, I couldn’t do that … they do a lot of things at the crèche (daycare), lots of things at school, and I need to work. To me, the perfect balance is to find a job that gives to the mother, but also to the father, a sense of fulfillment, and a place where the child is fine. Now, my children are fine at crèche and at school, and I am so happy to see them in the evening. So I think you need both.

We see from Bè’s narrative that a life of balance, a combination of domestic life and public life for all family members is the life replete with well-being. Let us now turn to the men.

Meanings of work for Parisian men

All the men with whom we spoke intended to remain employed until retirement age. Some of them had very demanding, highly paid jobs that required heavy travel; others were stressed out trying to manage jobs with limited flexibility and lower wages. Academics felt the frustration of not having enough time to do the part of their job that they loved the most – research and writing. For instance, when we asked Capitaine, a university professor, whether having had children has had any impact on his career, he laughed, saying, “Of course! … I have the idea that each child is equivalent to one book that you will never write!” Daudet, a lecturer, was trying to write a textbook, using every weekend for two years, with his bedroom doubling as his office. His wife, a schoolteacher, had a heavy schedule, and they were raising two young children. They were managing, barely. Jules, a professor with a doctorate, noted that he and his wife had a kind of competition over spending time on their careers. There was some friction in that both considered their own career as especially important.

Although some spouses are in competition for time, Tacopango, who now drives for a limousine service but who used to work in pharmaceutical sales, quit the latter job in order to accommodate his wife’s career and their growing family. One of them needed flexibility, and he thought it should be him as he had less education than she and his job, with much lower earnings than hers, was not one he cared for that much. With the job as a driver, he can adjust his schedule to his wife’s work hours so that they can better care for the children.

Another man who sought to optimize his well-being was Yves, age 45, with one child and one on the way. He had held several IT jobs over the years but felt burned out with the volatility in that industry. He had used his payments from winning his court case over an unfair dismissal in his last job to take the time to study for a new occupation as an accountant in public hospital administration. He was not passionate about this occupation, but his new qualification afforded him a standard workday with shorter hours than the IT industry. His new job was close to home so that he could be more available for the care of their son. Furthermore, the new occupation was portable, and he and his wife dreamed of moving out of Paris to a smaller city with lower housing costs and a better natural habitat for their children. Indeed, after the time of our interviews they have since been able to realize this dream.

Men could also be induced to shoulder more of the childcare so that their partner could work overtime. Germaine’s partner, an IT manager with a very stressful position, agreed with Germaine to ask his firm if he could leave work a bit early so that he could pick up their daughter from school at 6 pm once a week, starting from when she was age six. Germaine noted that it took him a long time to ask if he could have this arrangement because it was psychologically difficult for him, as a man, to ask (even though it was his right by law). His firm readily agreed. Eventually, at Germaine’s urging, he requested an additional day so that now he stays late three days and picks the daughter up at 6 pm on two days, while Germaine stays late the two days that her partner does the pick-up.

Men did change their schedules, or even their jobs, to better accommodate their partners’ employment circumstances and the needs of their small children. Some concessions were bigger than others, but all of them illustrate that for men, their partner’s ongoing employment itself as well as their well-being as a dual-earner family mattered.

Workplace challenges in Paris

As is well known to scholars of “family-friendly” workplace policies, the policies are only as good as their uptake (Perlow, 1997; Roberts, 2004, 2005). Someone has to be the first to make use of the leave in order for others to feel comfortable following suit. While we had expected that French women would not experience much discrimination at work since France has had a longer experience of women working full-time and because the legal framework supporting working women is strong, in fact, several women did narrate stories of having problems due to pregnancy or childbirth issues. For instance, Stephen, a sound engineer, told us that his wife, who worked for a small company producing documentary films, was dismissed when she told the producer that she was pregnant. “[She said] ‘I’m pregnant.’ And they said, ‘Oh, too bad.’” We heard accounts of discrimination regarding pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding in France resulting in job loss, pay cuts, detrimental re-organization, and failure to obtain promotions.

For instance, Daphne, age 38 and with three children, worked for a small firm in the publishing industry. After working there for five years, she found out she was pregnant with her first child. She asked her boss if she could move to New York with her husband, who had been offered a short-term assignment there, and work remotely for two years. She relates:

D²³: … so my boss was really mad at me because he doesn’t like pregnant women. He said it was a betrayal that I got pregnant. And he said that he accepted the whole maternity leave and the whole pregnancy, and he was okay if I move to New York, as long as I keep doing the same job in the company. But he cut my salary in half.

G²⁴: Are you kidding me?

D: And I said yes because it was important to me to keep a job and go to New York. I was okay to follow my husband, but only if I had a job …

Daphne further commented that the firm was owner-operated, with no union. Furthermore, the boss threatened her that she would never have another job in another company in this industry, so she did everything he asked of her (including taking the pay cut). She was the first one in the firm to stay after pregnancy; one woman before her had had to quit because of pregnancy. She remarked that after her experience, other women in the firm were able to get pregnant and stay, “because they were convinced it was their right.” As for the reason she wanted to stay, she explained that it was because she really liked the job, and she did not want to rely on her husband, and also because working gives her access to joint decision making in the home: “You work to make your own decisions, and I think it’s important that I show that to my daughter.”

Women with children also told us of difficulties being promoted. Céline, age 40, had one child and was expecting a second. She worked as an executive in a textile company. Earlier in her career when she had spent seven years at her first company, which was also a large firm, there was an opportunity for her to take the place of her boss, who was moving up in the firm. Although she was the employee with the most experience, she was not chosen. Céline related that they preferred to take someone that she had trained but who did not have children. Afterward they told her, “I’m going to tell you straight, and I don’t care if you record it or not.” They explained that because she had had a baby and had taken six months of leave rather than the standard three months, they did not give her the promotion. Another of our interviewees, Germaine, found her university job much reduced in scope and hours after she returned from taking a six-month maternity leave. She managed to segue into another position in the same university after eight months of looking. She told us ruefully that most women come right back to work after the standard three months of leave rather than taking six months as she had.

Finally, although breast-feeding rooms must be provided at workplaces by French law, Lewick’s wife, who worked for a large pharmaceutical company, was fired by her general manager because he did not approve of her breast-feeding her twins at lunch time. Most of the women with stories of harassment were working for small firms. It is possible that, as in Japan, it is much easier to make use of maternity leave schemes if one works in a large firm.²⁵

A few women noted the presence of a kind of “mommy track” or “glass ceiling” for women in France. Luce, who was a manager in a large software firm, remarked that French firms have a “traditional mentality” when it comes to the promotion of women, in comparison with US firms, but nowadays they are increasingly being pushed by global standards:

The men! The men—they rule! They rule the company, so they decide … Now things are better, because … I mean, due to the fact of globalization … and the fact that companies are much more in synergy worldwide, they see the practice, and they don’t have choice anyway …

Juliet, who was an editor for a well-known journal, was similar in age, occupation, and career to that of her spouse, yet his income was higher. We wondered why:

H²⁶: You worked for 20 years, and you have a master’s degree. And your husband also has worked for 20 years, and has a master’s … and you are working for the same institution, same industry, right?

J²⁷: He works here, in the same building.

H: So same length of working years, same level of education, and I see a difference in salary. Why do you think?

J: (Rolls eyes and laughs) You know why! Alors [So]. Seriously, pourquoi [why]? … because I’m a woman, obviously. Because I have a glass ceiling to maneuver … They accorded him more responsibility in the enterprise. And so, he earns a bit more than I do. Not too much more. But on the other hand, my post is more prestigious. Because I work for the oldest review [of its kind] in France. It is the most well-known review in France. It’s the top level.

In order to overcome this discrimination, Juliet was studying to become a judge, where she thought she would have a more even playing field as a public servant. Juliet had remained at this journal for many years despite inequitable treatment because of its prestige. But now, in mid-life, she is attempting to switch careers for a more rewarding future.

Tokyo and Paris: Comparisons

In the preceding section we discussed the meanings of work for women and men in the two societies, as well as some difficulties women encountered at the workplace. Work to these French women was taken for granted, as it was to their husbands to have working partners. Amelie even felt uneasy when she was unemployed for a few months, uncomfortable at being a dependent of her husband. In contrast, some of our Tokyo respondents only gradually realized how important their careers were to their well-being, because the default role for married women in Japan is the domestic role. And some Japanese male interviewees saw their wives’ employment as less central than their household role. Both French and Japanese women worked for the financial independence it afforded, although this came through more strongly in our French sample. Men in both settings often spent long hours at work, but some of our Tokyo informants spoke about work in terms of responsibility and sense of purpose, sacrificing their holidays or vacation time for work, while our French informants, though surely no less responsible on the job, had no qualms over taking their allotted time off. Several French female interviewees experienced workplace harassment, as did two of the Japanese women we interviewed. They persevered. As Luce indicated, some companies now must come up to the “global standard” although reluctantly.

In the next section, we will turn to the household arena, to inquire about how gender figures into the division of household labor, and then discuss the cultural expectations around motherhood as an important factor explaining the differences between these societies.

Gender and the Division of Household Labor

Family care – who does what, with whom, when – is an essential matter for our Tokyo and Paris families. It carries with it overtones of gendered notions of who should do what, when, and how much. In the next section we elaborate on how families construct well-being through the division of labor.

Tokyo Households

In Tokyo, most of the men we studied did little housework or childcare during the week, because they usually came home much later than their wives. Mr. Omori, a consultant, made breakfast for his children in the mornings and took his younger one to school, but it was the hired domestic help who cared for the children and did the housecleaning until the parents returned home much later in the evening. But such cases are rare. While most Japanese dislike relying on strangers to care for the household, Mr. Omori and his wife, both of whom had grown up abroad, had no qualms about this arrangement, which they could afford as they were both high-income earners. In the case of the Samejimas, Mr. Samejima was the main caregiver, picking up his daughter from daycare, cooking dinner, and putting her to bed before his wife came home. This, too, was an exception. Mr. Samejima had also lived abroad extensively, had married his wife for her passion toward her career, and gave priority to it over his own. It was more common that households were organized under the assumption that the wife would do the majority of household work during the week while the husband would pitch in with childcare and some cleaning and perhaps cooking on the weekends.

Mr. Fujiwara recognized that he does less of the household work than his wife. He remarked:

We share, but my wife would certainly say I do less … and it’s true. That is a fact. It’s not like the total professional-housewife thing, where she does all the housework and I work, but I do more work and she does more housework, it is true. I do dishwashing after dinner …

Other than that, he turns on the robotic vacuum cleaner, and he takes out the garbage. He also washes the bath at least once a week. He remarked that after the second child was born, they began fighting over the division of labor: “Even now, my wife wants me to do more. She made a graph of how little I do! That was after the second child was born … ” He explained how his wife made an Excel sheet to demonstrate how little household work he was doing as compared to her. He tried to increase his share, but ended up backsliding.

We can see from Mr. Fujiwara’s narrative that while the division of labor in the household is not equal, and though it is a source of dissention, he is not going to change his ways. The Fujiwaras began to hire domestic help at his suggestion, once a week to do laundry and cleaning, but the couple still argues about the unequal load of household work. Mr. Fujiwara himself seemed somewhat bothered by his lesser role in the household division of labor. When we were discussing his vision of family life for the future, he said he hoped his children would have dual-income families with a uniform cooperation style. He remarked, ‘We have tried, but my wife has ended up doing more. It seems kind of bad, too bad. I don’t know why it turned out that way … but also, I want to succeed at work, I have that feeling. So, there were quite a few times when I should have stayed at home, but I gave priority to work. I couldn’t compromise.

How can we interpret Mr. Fujiwara’s statements? While he recognizes the inequality of the division of labor in his household, he acts on his desire to succeed at work, which means he puts more of his energies toward that rather than to the household, leaving his disgruntled wife to take on the extra portion. North (2009) referred to this sort of behavior as the exertion of patriarchal prestige. To be fair, we might conclude that Mr. Fujiwara finds himself between a rock and a hard place. He expressed chagrin that in the end, his wife takes on a greater share of the burden of household labor, but he wants to do well in his work, and in order to do so, he prioritizes it. The male-breadwinner model, where masculinity is equivalent to complete dedication to work, has a stronger grip than the notion of gender equality, which was introduced much later than in France (Osawa, 2011). In addition, and due to the normative gender role pattern, the work environment does not accommodate fathering to the extent it does mothering, no matter the legal framework (Fankhauser et al., 2018; North, 2014; Goldstein-Gidoni, 2020).

Sometimes women readily choose to do the brunt of housework and childcare, such as Mrs. Machida. Others take on a heavier share less willingly and fight about it, like Mrs. Fujiwara. Still others realize after many years that they have been doing much more than their fair share, and they rebel. Mrs. Ikeuchi related to us that she had done the bulk of the household work throughout the time she worked full-time in the IT industry. Moreover, she had been paying 40% of the household expenses from her salary, in proportion to her earnings. When she left IT and took a non-profit sector job, however, her salary plummeted. After some time, she realized the economic value of her housework. In her words:

I suddenly realized I was doing so much housework, 90:10, but not being paid for it. I told him I’m not going to put money into that [household] account anymore! Even when I was at [the IT firm] I did almost as much housework as I’m doing now … I told him I’m doing 20,000 USD worth of housework if we had to pay someone for it, but he doesn’t get it. Most Japanese men don’t get it. Structurally … Japanese women, now, under the Abe administration—it’s ‘Work! Raise Children! And Shine!’ That is just too ridiculous, and it makes me mad. And most of the people around me think the same way.

We can see from the above account that it sometimes takes time before women realize the inequity in taking on the bulk of the household labor and childcare as well as commanding full-time paid employment. Mrs. Hori, a tax accountant, came to a similar epiphany about the gendered division of labor. Her husband was a news reporter who would regularly come home in the middle of the night. The only household help he gave was dropping the children off at daycare when he was not out somewhere else on assignment. This life was extremely stressful for Mrs. Hori, who would leave home at 5 am to go to work early so that she could get back in time to pick up the children. She regularly got only 3–4 hours of sleep for several years. Her husband did not want to outsource any domestic work because he did not want a stranger in the house, and although he thought that helping his daughters with homework was bothersome, he did not approve of hiring a home tutor. She said she thought this life was normal. Yet when their daughter did not do well in her studies, her husband blamed and pressured Mrs. Hori. Now, because of that, she is thinking about divorce.

Mrs. Hori, in narrating her account above, said, “I thought this life was normal.” This statement is revealing. Many Japanese women have internalized the notion that women should do more of the household work. If they do it well, society looks upon them favorably as good wives and mothers. How they perform in their career jobs is incidental. If something goes wrong, as in Mrs. Hori’s account, it is the mother who is blamed, because mothers are the parents responsible for the outcomes of the children and the management of the household (Edwards & E-gov hōrei kenso (e-government law search), 1989; Jolivet, 1997; Lebra, 1985). In the past, a woman in Mrs. Hori’s position might have accepted such blame, but the fact that it is motivating her to divorce illustrates her deep discontent with this assumption. It also indicates that there has been a sea change in how she views her own well-being.

Parisian Households

In a cross-national study of attitudes toward maternal employment and gender equality in the home, sociologists Wei-hsin Yu and Pei-lin Lee argue that men and women in society compensate for the transformation of gender roles in the public sphere by at least ‘becoming less insistent on eliminating

gendered practices in the private sphere' (Yu & Lee, 2013, p. 617). Certainly, women in France partake of a public sphere where they can enjoy the fruits of high achievement in a relatively egalitarian atmosphere. In accordance with the statistics we mentioned earlier in the paper, however, most women we interviewed were doing more of the household labor than were their partners – some willingly and some less willingly. As one Parisian interviewee remarked, women have “the mental load” (la charge mentale). This is in reference to the popular French blogger Emma, who writes humorously about women’s struggles with men over their share of the household chores and childrearing as women assume the “mental load” of organizing, reminding, and planning (Barberio, 2018).

In our study, many women readily admitted that they had chosen to take on more of the household labor in their relationship. In Juliet’s case, this meant also choosing to change her job to one closer to home, but which paid less than her previous one, when she had her first child. Her firm had moved and it would have required a long commute for her. So, she changed to another office, doing the same editing work but for a lower salary. She agreed to the salary because she wanted to be close to her family, to spend more time with her children.

Luce, the software firm manager, related that her husband does little housework as he is from a “very traditional French family,” from Orléans, and Roman Catholic. She noted his very gendered notions of “women do this, men do that.” She takes on all the home tasks as well as handling her own job, where she takes Wednesday afternoons off in order to be with the children for that half-day when school recessed early. She told us that she chose not to push for promotions in the firm:

G²⁸: And what about your ideas about promotion within your company?

L²⁹: No, not that much. I mean … How do you say that? La concession? You have to … you have to choose … you need to choose between your personal life and your promotion. I cannot get access to … But I’m fine with that, you know. And because my husband has a good job, and I can afford it of course. But for sure if … If I wanted a promotion, I should avoid … doing those things [such as taking Wednesday afternoon off].

The aforementioned journal editor, Juliet, had spent so much of her life doing more of the household labor than her husband that when he suddenly brought home his teenage daughter from a previous marriage, she decided she had had enough, and she took off her wedding ring in protest:

I really had had too much … I was about to have a nervous breakdown, and then my stepdaughter arrived at the house, and there would have been three children to manage. My husband didn’t ask her to do [help with] anything, and I found it was too complicated, I even wanted to leave the family, take my two boys, and let them figure it out all by themselves. It’s my revolution!

She told him she would divorce him if he did not start doing more in the household. He did not want a divorce, so he finally started to help more. The stepdaughter remained. Juliet’s was the only French story we heard of threatened divorce, however.

Charles, a professor, mused ruefully about gender equality in the household. In his words:

I am of a generation of men for whom it is important to have sexual equality in family tasks. And I think I, I try to do it the best I can, and I do a lot of things, and sometimes I realize that ‘a lot of things’ isn’t 50%. I think that’s my problem … I think we misevaluate the full time which is necessary to do all the things. I don’t realize [it] and I have a bad evaluation to estimate the time … so when I do 30 [percent], it’s not dishonesty, I think I have done 50 [percent]. Really, I don’t think to be someone dishonest and who tries to cheat and … to do less. That’s not the point!

Although there were a few cases, such as Tacopango’s or Capitaine’s, where men performed quite a lot of cooking, cleaning, and childcare because their wives’ jobs were more demanding or less flexible, in most of the Paris cases we studied, women’s share of the “mental load” was greater. Women were the main child-carers, but their partners provided significant back-up, readying the children for school, picking up or dropping off the children, cooking, supervising homework, taking out the garbage, and doing the taxes and handyman jobs. Grandparents, too, often assisted with childcare, especially during the frequent school vacations. Through liberal utilization of the substantial educational and care support systems that their government provides, women were able to do more than half their share of childcare and household management as well as the work they wanted to do.

Discussion

The accounts of Mrs. Ikeuchi and Mrs. Hori, who both began to question their husbands’ lack of cooperation and understanding of their domestic work, have strong parallels with the narrative of Juliet, the Parisian journal editor who took off her wedding ring in protest over her unrecognized household labor. We see women in both cultures struggling to convince their partners to fully value their contributions. This struggle can be framed as what McDowell et al. (2010) refer to as a “moral economy” of care. Women, as partners and mothers, take on much more of the care burden in families, and indeed this has been culturally normative. As McDowell et al. note, women “… modify and renegotiate their values over time in interplay with their changing experiences and their web of social relationships through which their self-identity is constituted” (McDowell et al., 2010, p. 224). When women co-shoulder the breadwinning role, some come to realize the unfairness of the care proposition. The women in our Paris sample had more support from their partners than did the women in Tokyo, but the division of labor was not equal, nor did they necessarily want it to be exactly equal – women like Luce did not mind “la concession.” On the other hand, they had their red lines, as Juliet found when her husband brought home his daughter and assumed she would care for her. One man in our Paris sample, Tacopango, had less education and a lower status job than his wife, and he was happy to have her career take priority. Hypogamy may give women more opportunities to pursue their careers freely, but our sample is too small to conclude this. Japanese women generally marry their educational equals or higher, which bodes ill for the chances of their spouses putting priority on their wife’s career rather than their own.³⁰ The patriarchal prerogative, too, exists in both societies.³¹ Prevailing norms of masculinity have a grip both on Mr. Fujiwara, the executive, and Charles, the professor. The difference is that Charles’s share of the household labor is greater. So, where is the qualitative difference? It may lie in the cultural standards of being a mother, to which we shall now turn.

Standards of Mothering in Both Settings

We have observed that mothering was important to our Parisian informants. It was the women who shaved time from their jobs to spend more time with the children. But the mothering that Parisians expect to do is different from the mothering standards in Japan (Allison, 1991; Jolivet, 1997; Sasagawa, 2006). Mothers in Paris hand over their children to nannies or the crèche after their childcare leave is ended without guilt. Since the 1980s, wage work for French women has been normalized; they have been freed from the notion that the role of “mother” and “wife” in the family are women’s only proper roles. As we saw from Danielle’s narrative, the social opprobrium comes to women who do not fulfill the potential of their education, not to women who return to the workforce. High-quality kindergarten education is provided to all young children; mothers do not have to worry about quitting work to manage the short hours of kindergartens.

The stories of our Tokyo informants illustrate a society in flux, and one struggling with various shortfalls between needs and necessary infrastructure. As Mr. Sawada told his wife when she wanted to go out to work, if a woman (mother) wants to work, the family must have daycare of some kind. More than maternity harassment, the problem that many of our Tokyo interviewees faced was a shortage of daycare openings. For instance, one couple we interviewed, the Samejimas, reluctantly placed their two-month-old baby in a crowded, unlicensed daycare room to get more points for placement in a licensed public center the following April. Mrs. Samejima could have used childcare leave and stayed home herself until April, but if she had done so, she feared there would be no slot for her baby – as a well-paid executive, she would lack priority. As mentioned earlier, Tokyo has suffered from long waiting lists for licensed daycare. While the government has increased the number of slots with the “Angel Plans” and “0 Waitlist” campaigns (Boling, 2015; Fankhauser et al., 2018; Roberts, 2002, 2016), they have not kept pace with the number of women with childcare needs rejoining the employment market. Tokyo, unlike Paris, lacks a large migrant population willing to take jobs as nannies.³² Those nannies who exist usually command high wages, and couples cannot write the expense off their income taxes as they can in Paris. In France, domestic help, as mentioned earlier, was also largely government subsidized for dual-worker families.

In Tokyo, parents (usually the mother) often take a shorter “childcare time” workday while their child is younger than four, but after that, they must return to regular hours. Daycare centers’ closing hours are often at 6 pm. Mr. Hattori noted that his wife changed her firm when their child turned four to a part-time job with a much-reduced salary because “It was difficult to keep working long hours while trying to raise a child.” Here we see that it was Mrs. Hattori, not Mr. Hattori, who sacrificed her full-time, regular position to better care for the child. We heard no Parisian mother saying she needed to get up early in the morning to make an elaborate box lunch for her child, as some Japanese informants did.³³ Lunches are handled by school cafeterias, which offer well-balanced, four-course meals. Nor did Parisians worry much about breakfast or the evening meal during the week. They all said they just throw something together quickly, and they did not seem to feel apologetic about this.

In our estimation, Parisian families lack the heavy mothering norm that is prevalent in Japan. At the same time, many of the women in our sample had two or three children. They seemed happy with that choice. Furthermore, Parisian mothers have the strong financial backing of their government and availability of domestic help with the assistance of government subsidies. The legitimacy of hiring help, whether for childcare or cleaning, was taken for granted by our informants. There was no social stigma associated with hiring help. Not everyone we interviewed availed themselves of it, but it was a socially recognized option. In Japan, in contrast, hiring others for this work is not normalized. It has to be justified (for instance, when Mr. Omori claimed that because he and his wife grew up in England, they had no problem with hiring outside help). In Japan, most families still think that domestic work should be shouldered within the family, and while the conservative norm labeling care work as women’s work is now diminishing, the notion that this work could be outsourced has not yet been embraced. Our French interviewees told us they realized their good fortune in the support they receive from the government coffers. Their taxes are reputed to be high, but they did not complain to us about it, as they considered them well spent.

Conclusion

We began this paper by querying couples’ motivations to work and the meaning of it in their lives, their means to accomplishing their goals of work and family care, as well as the obstacles they met in two of the world’s capital cities. Although the French have had a much longer time to become accustomed to the dual-earner model, the way in which they have done so remains gendered. And for the most part, this is accepted although some women desire their partners to participate more in the household. In Japan, the shift to dual-career households has been over a much shorter timeframe. There are still many households and enterprises that embody and promote the male-breadwinner model; it is still enshrined in the tax code, and we daresay, in the hearts and minds of many politicians. Conservative social values continue to hold some sway over peoples’ lifestyles even for those who desire change (Roberts, 2019). The views from Paris and Tokyo reveal how pro-natal familialism and gender equality make strange bedfellows, unless the family is very broadly writ, with diverse types, based on individual liberty to easily enter and exit, and with strong social institutional support, such as what the French system has evolved. Against this backdrop, a few features of this comparative landscape stand out to us.

One is that the imperatives of being a middle- to upper-middle-class parent in Paris and Tokyo are different. Parents in Tokyo face a demanding and difficult public education system. The costs of private cram schools and extra-curricular lessons are heavy, and the parental time devotion necessary to push children through the system successfully is significant. University education is also costly. Parisians did not mention these sorts of concerns to us at all. The levels of government support for the middle class in France are high enough to do the heavy lifting for French middle-class families. Our Parisian informants were very aware and appreciative of this fact. We feel that the middle class in Paris is more secure in their well-being, although it was also tenuous at times. While work was demanding, they had more time for relaxation than their Tokyo counterparts. They had more moments of connection as a family, as a couple, or solo with friends. They took their vacations fully. In contrast, two of our Japanese male respondents wistfully talked of wanting to return to explore Europe, but only after retirement.

Another significant difference between the two systems is evidenced by Yves, who at mid-life returned to school to obtain a qualification for a career change, or Juliet, who is doing the same in an attempt to become a judge. This would be unlikely in Japan, where one is fairly locked into the internal job market from one’s early career years, and graduate school attendance is not so common because people obtain training from their firms. Although the Japanese system is gradually changing, it is still not common to switch jobs at mid-career expecting to improve one’s standing.

Both Paris and Tokyo have high costs of living. As in Paris, the middle-class families in Tokyo needed double incomes to live a comfortable life. The women in Tokyo we interviewed shared in common with Parisian women the notion that from work they gain sociality, feelings of personal achievement, and financial stability of their own. While Japan still has a sizeable number of single-earner male-breadwinner households, this is much less common in France. Perhaps as the number of such households recedes in Japan, the “naturalness” of women returning to the domestic realm to raise the children will also dissipate. If this happens, then the social opprobrium one garners when not following this normative path should lessen. We feel there are other important factors that would also have to change, however. Corporations would need to reduce their hours of “service overtime” (unpaid overtime), allow more flexibility, and let workers return home to care for their families. As Mrs. Ikeuchi pointed out, it is impossible for women to follow the imperatives of former Prime Minister Abe’s “Womenomics.” As well, so-called “salaryman masculinity” remains strong. But we have seen diversity in the sample of men we have interviewed. They are not all cut of the same cloth. Mr. Sekiguchi, who quit his prestigious position as a national bureaucrat in order to have a less hierarchical and less stressful lifestyle, is a case in point, as is Mr. Samejima, who negotiated with his future boss to allow him to pick up his daughter at daycare, putting his wife’s career first. These men could be change agents for a Japan where couples have more freedom to maneuver.

Both governments in recent years have tried to boost natality by offering supports for families while maintaining the assumption that women as mothers are the primary caregivers. But in France, work is structured so that women with children can take short maternity leaves, return to work at 90% or full-time, maintain a good salary at work they deem worthwhile doing, and rest at ease that their children will not suffer the worse for it. In Japan, infant care is scarce, and women usually take at least a year off. They are full of anxiety about whether the child will be placed in daycare upon their return to work – to wit, the case of the Samejimas. Domestic help is only starting to be outsourced and only by a minority of dual-career families; it is costly, and not government subsidized. In addition, the Japanese, as Mrs. Hori related, tend to eschew having strangers in the home. In fact, Japanese society has apparently lost its institutional memory of pre-war Japan, when outsourcing was common (Ochiai, 2014, p. 223), but this, too, may change in the future as the immigrations system evolves and more women combine motherhood and employment.

In their quantitative study of marital happiness in Japan, Kaufman and Taniguchi (2009, p. 83) ask if men and women who implement changes towards egalitarian sharing of gender roles will see an increase in their marital happiness. They point to Japanese couples’ relationships as being in transition from a more “separate spheres” model, wherein men’s role is the breadwinner and women’s the homemaker/childrearer, to the “trading” model of Oppenheimer (1997), wherein men become more involved in the domestic sphere and women increasingly become co-breadwinners, hence specialization erodes. We cannot definitively say with our study that couples are moving toward a sharing model nor can we say whether that gives them more satisfaction, or higher well-being, as a couple. Most of our interviews were with one party in the couple, not both, hence we cannot determine the quotient of marital well-being since our data is mostly one-sided. Was Juliet’s spouse happy with her demand to step up his household work if he wanted to remain married? We cannot say. With her demand, she was acting on what she felt she needed to maintain her own well-being. Her spouse did end up changing his behavior, hence one could argue this compromise increased their well-being as a couple. Divorce has its disamenities as well, after all. Was Mr. Fujiwara’s wife disgruntled that he did not manage to keep up all of his side of the task allotment Excel sheet? Maybe, but they also remained married. Mr. Fujiwara himself, while not adhering to the separate spheres marital bargain of the post-war Showa era, seemed confident in his job and happy with his life; he was making an effort, which was probably more than many of his colleagues. Taga (2009, p. 182) indicates that salaried men in Japan face a dilemma of how to be successful in their careers while simultaneously maintaining intimate relations with their families. The same was concluded by Mathews (2014, 2017) in his study of well-being among Japanese couples. What we can say from our study is that we perceive some dissatisfaction among some wives regarding the amount of household work and childcare their husbands perform, while others accepted the extra burden as normal for women, and yet others naturalized it to an extent, but also expected their spouses to cooperate as best they could. As Brinton found in her study (2017, p. 153), in Japan, women’s satisfaction with marriage “is related to how they feel about the household division of labor, whatever it may objectively be.” And we can say this is true for both societies, but the extent men are expected to participate in the household – the norm of their household participation – is greater in France, as reflected in national statistics on how much housework men perform. Furthermore, the presence of strong institutions of family support, as we have elaborated above, seems to assist greatly in the choreography of family, work and care in contemporary society. As Holthus and Manzenreiter (2017, p. 260) suggest, multiple levels need to be considered when we study the well-being of individuals, families, and societies.

We began the paper inquiring about the work and family care nexus in these two societies, and how people achieve subjective well-being. Neither might be terribly comfortable in the other’s shoes. Well-being is relative, as we have shown. It is relative interpersonally as well as inter-culturally. Perhaps more importantly, we have found that while both societies uphold gender equality as a goal, neither society has reached its attainment. This should not be surprising. In the historical course of Western societies as well as Eastern societies, the legal frameworks for gender equality are of recent coinage. The result – the practices of gender equality on the ground – are culturally constructed. The men and women we studied in both settings seemed satisfied enough with continuing to play their not-quite-“traditional” roles, but still gendered. If they were not satisfied, they used their personal agency to make their “revolution” as Juliet said or as Mrs. Hori contemplated, to attempt to retrieve their well-being. In neither society have social institutions fully met the ideal of gender equality, but in both France and Japan, legal provisions fostering gender equality are being strengthened, affording useful tools for social change. In each society, signs of change in attitudes and behaviors are visible like with those among our interviewees, and individuals are making choices which will change the outcomes for succeeding generations.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Pierre-Jean Colas and Nathalie Rémond, who assisted us with interpretation, translation and transcription for the French data. Many thanks also to those who helped us to find interviewees, as well as to brilliant peer reviewers who provided us with much inspiration. Finally we thank this journal editor, Isaac Gagne, for his generous assistance, encouragement and patience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Actions [753717]; Waseda University Special Projects Research [2017B-332, 2018K-394, 2019C-388].

Notes on contributors

Glenda S. Roberts

Glenda S. Roberts (PhD Cornell 1986) is a sociocultural anthropologist and Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies (GSAPS). Waseda University, in Tokyo. where she has taught since its inception in 1998. She is a former President of the Society for East-Asian Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, and an Adjunct Senior Fellow of the East-West Center in Honolulu,Hawaiʻi. Her main areas of research and publication concern gender, work, and family in contemporary society,  and the reception of international migration in Japan.

Hiroko Costantini

Hiroko Costantini (PhD Cambridge) is Research Fellow at The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policy (LIEPP) at SciencesPo (Paris) and at the Institute of Population Ageing, University of Oxford. Following her PhD in gender and sexuality studies centralizing on male informal carers in Japan, her recent research addresses issues of population aging in Japan and France based on ethnographic fieldwork.

Notes

¹ In 2015, France’s total public social expenditure on families as a percent of GDP was the highest in the OECD at 3.7%; Japan’s was 1.6%, while Korea was at 1.4%, the USA at 1.1%, and Mexico and Greece at 1.0% (OECD Family Database, 2020, accessed 13 June 2020 at https://stats.oecd.org/viewhtml.aspx?datasetcode=FAMILY&lang=en#). In the fields of political science and sociology there is debate about whether Japan falls into Gospa Esping-Anderson’s “conservative” welfare model, where familialism is strong, or whether it is a hybrid model falling between the “liberal” and the “conservative” models (Esping-Anderson, 1997, 1999; Miyamoto, 2003). The nuances of this topic are beyond our field of expertise.

² This paper is the result of a dual collaboration between two scholars who study contemporary Japan: Hiroko Costantini, who works at SciencesPo in Paris, and Glenda Roberts, who ordinarily works in Tokyo but who had the opportunity to spend her sabbatical in Paris at the EHESS in 2017–18. Having Paris literally at our doorstep afforded us the time and wherewithal to carry out the project.

³ Please see a list of the interviewees in the Appendix.

⁴ Hence, we have no data from the COVID-19 era. We will perform a follow-up study for this.

⁵ Please see a list of the interviewees in the Appendix.

⁶ Seventy percent of men took less than two weeks of leave, with almost 40% of men taking fewer than five days. In contrast, 60% of women took ten or more months of childcare leave. At present, men earn 80% of their salaries during leave (Japan Times, 15 May 2020, p. 4).

⁷ For instance, in October 2018, there were 9,833 children waiting to be placed (MHLW, 2019).

⁸ Here de Singly is referring to the fact that while the family form of the 1950s was still composed of a heterosexual couple and their children, seemingly like nuclear families of earlier centuries, in fact they were not, because what mattered in the 1950s was the focus on people and relationships among members. In the decades after the 1980s, this then developed into the “warm place” noted by Dupont, which was accepting of diverse family forms.

⁹ Pacsé (or PACS) is a status in-between marriage and cohabitation that requires filing a civil partnership agreement with the notary public. PACS partners are required to give mutual material aid and have joint solidarity for current debts. They are taxed in common with joint solidarity for payment. Wealth tax is also joint. A will is necessary in order to inherit from each other, however they do have temporary right to the home. They have no right to a survivor’s pension. Termination of status is through a notary public (mutually agreed) or bailiff (unilateral severance). The PACS terminates if the couple decide to marry. The main difference between marriage and PACS is that with the former, the surviving partner inherits in toto and maintains a right to the home. As well, the survivor has conditional right to a survivor’s pension. Furthermore, married spouses can divorce through the family court by a judge, with a compensatory allowance disbursed if one partner suffers disparity due to the divorce (Kandil & Périvier, 2017, pp. 9–10). PACS are chosen more often by people with tertiary education, and they are more popular in the large metropolitan areas (Planetoscope.com, 2020).

¹⁰ Although our study is in Paris where most nounou are of migrant origin, we are informed by French scholars that this is not true of less urban areas where fewer migrants live, and Frenchwomen of non-migrant background are more likely to work as caregivers.

¹¹ Fagnani does not elaborate but women in our study told us the public daycare was of very high quality; they preferred it to hiring a nanny since the latter would not give their children the opportunity to play with others, nor do most nannies have the professional training that childminders have, and it is more secure to have one’s child in a public care setting with multiple childminders.

¹² One of our female informants mentioned that it should be extended much further if it is really to encourage gender equality in the household.

¹³ In Kandil and Périvier’s survey, domestic labor is defined as “… cooking, dishwashing, laundry, putting away and cleaning, household management, trips, caring for children, caring for adults, and miscellaneous” (Kandil & Périvier, 2017, p. 11). Their data was based on Insée time-use surveys of couples in three time periods since 1985.

¹⁴ “H” stands for Hiroko Costantini; “G” for Glenda Roberts. Following Japanese protocol, we use surnames when referring to Japanese interviewees. The French in our study preferred us to use given names or their choice of names.

¹⁵ Mrs. Samejima appears again later in this paper. Several years post-divorce, she re-married and had her only child with her current spouse, Mr. Samejima.

¹⁶ Samejima

¹⁷ Glenda Roberts

¹⁸ Each of the grandmothers was taking the baby one day a week, and the babysitter came one day a week, so Mrs.Tauchi was able to work fully three days per week.

¹⁹ In recent years, the Japanese government has tried to promote men’s participation in household labor and childcare. The term for these men is ikumen (see Mizukoshi et al., 2016).

²⁰ Although it is common in foreign capital firms for employees to transfer within the firm by applying for job postings that are made available to all employees, Mrs. Ohmatsu definitely felt that her boss was harassing her out of her position now that she had an infant and a small child.

²¹ In France, maternity leave generally lasts three months, although one can take up to six months for the third and

subsequent children. Some of our informants worked at companies where the policies were more generous than the

three months allowed by law, or they used their accumulated paid leave to extend their maternity leave.

²² We are not claiming here that all French women share Danielle’s attitude that highly educated women should not be playing in the sandbox with their children during the workweek, nor her friend’s opinion that women who are well-qualified yet who quit their careers to take on less arduous work are spoiling the chances for other women in that field. Yet she herself did identify her attitude as being particularly French, or, “upper-class Parisian.” Such views adhere to the male standard of how to succeed in corporate culture. They may also reflect upper-class social patterns where hands-on childcare is more the job of nannies than mothers.

²³ Daphne

²⁴ Glenda Roberts

²⁵ In fact, we were told this is so by an interviewee in Paris who was a professional HR manager in a large multinational firm.

²⁶ Hiroko Costantini

²⁷ Juliet

²⁸ Glenda Roberts

²⁹ Luce

³⁰ We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

³¹ See North (2009) for an exegesis on patriarchal privilege among Japanese dual earner public servants.

³² Although migrant residents have now climbed to over 2% of Japan’s population, Japan lacks a migration policy welcoming so-called “un-skilled” labor for settlement (see Roberts, 2018).

³³ Rising very early to prepare an elaborate boxed lunch for their school-aged children was also a source of pride for the salarywomen in Roberts’ (2011, 2019) longitudinal study of urban Tokyo salarywomen. See also Allison (1991) for an exegesis on the symbolic power of the boxed lunch in motherhood in Japan.