What do I study?
My latest article is about how fertility is influenced by mother-daughter relationships. It is one of a series of papers I’ve authored or co-authored on women’s life cycle decisions in Japan, and how they play out in the context of a gender-stratified job market, rigid division of household labor, and broader cultural value systems. I find this topic compelling not only because East Asian women’s life choices are a largely untold sociological story: understanding the drivers of lifecourse decisions can also have deep practical implications given the extremely low fertility rates in East Asia. Once we find the variables that suppress fertility, we can start conversations about what we want and how to get there. For example, do very low fertility societies wish to tackle sub-replacement level fertility or rather learn to live with it?
I came to focus on women’s choices almost by accident. I had heard anecdotes about how getting a Ph.D. kills a woman’s value on the marriage market in societies with conservative value orientations, and that young women are increasingly reluctant to pursue both career and family in those settings. I knew also that some of my female students were denied job interviews solely because of their gender, and they are not imagining the reason: employers told them so to their face. These anecdotes, coming through day-to-day interactions, motivated my inquiry into issues such as fertility intentions as empirical examples of the dynamic and co-constructive interaction between social processes and individual life outcomes.
More broadly, I am interested in explaining individual choices in relation to a variety of opportunities and constraints. This theoretical interest runs through several topical strands. In addition to women's life choices, I have looked at the social implications of technology — the variable diffusion of information platforms, community involvement in nuclear waste management, and most recently the implications of artificial intelligence in human-machine work groups.
How do I study?
I typically work with survey data, using standard tools for categorical data such as logistic regression and Poisson regression, but I also use non-frequentist methods when it suits the problem at hand. With my graduate students, I have also dabbled in quantitative analysis of text data.
Academic turning points
After college, I worked as a systems analyst in Tokyo. My task was to develop software to handle derivative transactions such as futures, swaps, and options. I had taken an introductory sociology class in college, which exposed me to Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. These made such a strong impression that I kept reading sociology books on my daily commute. Eventually, I enrolled in a graduate program in sociology at a university in the Tokyo area, earned an MA and then decided to pursue a PhD at the University of Chicago. There I discovered the power of quantitative analysis and learned how to generate interesting theoretical questions. I was extremely fortunate as a student and feel grateful to my principal advisor, Professor Andrew Abbott, and other scholars, including Professors James Davis, Roger Gould, Saskia Sassen, and Kazuo Yamaguchi. Fellow students, including Fabio Rojas and Harris Kim, educated me as well. True to the Chicago tradition of interdisciplinarity, I now work regularly with scholars from neighboring fields. Bill Lawless, a mathematician and psychologist, has been a source of inspiration and we have collaborated on several papers and book chapters over the years. Gill Steel, a political scientist, helped me understand the intricate operation of power in Japanese social life.
Final words
I am open for collaborative work, including comparative research. I also serve as a chair on several dissertation committees. My office door is always open, so to speak.