若年非正規雇用・無業とジェンダー: 性別分業意識が女性をフリーターにするのか?

Abstract

It is often asserted that the reason why young women are more apt than young men to be jobless or part-time workers is their sex-role attitude. This hypothesis argues that men have no choice other than working full time, but women have several choices: full-time job, part-time job or joblessness. Because young women with a strong sex-role attitude have little incentive to work full time, they tend to be jobless or part-time workers. Therefore, young women are more apt to be jobless or part-time workers than are young men. The aim of this paper is to examine this hypothesis which we call the "sex-role hypothesis." We show that previous papers do not prove the sex-role hypothesis; they merely assert the hypothesis from the results of only a few interviews with young jobless or part-time workers, or they show only zero-order association between young women's jobs and sex-role attitude. Our data are a sample from the Kinki area of Japan in 2005, the respondents being men and women aged between 18 and 34. The survey was conducted through face-to-face interviews and web pages. The results of logistic-regression analyses show that sex-role attitude still has a significant effect on the "Freeter" dummy when education is controlled, but that its effect disappears when age is controlled. This means that women aged between 18 and 25 have a stronger sex-role attitude and arc more apt to be jobless or part-time workers than those aged from 30 to 34. It produces a spurious association between their jobs and their sex-role attitude, while there is no causal relationship between them. This result falsifies the sex-role hypothesis, and implies that young women's jobs and sex-role attitude are structurally conditioned by social constraints that change according to age.