2013/02/24

Title:  From Dutiful Daughters to English Professors: How Gender Shapes the Professional Lives of Japanese Female University English Professors

Speaker: Diane Hawley Nagatomo

Hawley-Nagatomo explains for background purposes that education is gender stratified because, for one reason, the role of housewife and mother are highly idealized and women leave the workforce soon after childbirth. From her research, she explains that many women, however, do enter higher education but more often than not attend “lesser” quality institutions no matter their ability. Some reasons are that parents want to keep their daughters at home, or that education for women is more of a self-fulfilling endeavor whereas education for a male is for his own (and future family’s) livelihood. We can see that family plays an important role here. Keep the daughters close for caretaking, push the sons as much as possible for financial caretaking. Her participants pointed out that families also play an important role in encouraging women to study English, thought to be a “feminine” subject. Women who do progress to professional careers share characteristics such as that both their mother and father are university graduates themselves and live in urban areas already. In academia, participants reported that it’s still a man’s world and often they can not crack the secret code of their male colleagues. 

Diane Hawley Nagatomo has been living and teaching in Japan since 1979. She is an associate professor at Ochanomizu University and has a PhD in linguistics from Macquarie University. Her research interests include language teacher identity, language learner identity, and materials development. She has authored and co-authored numerous EFL textbooks for the Japanese market. Her most recent book, Exploring JapaneseUniversity  English Teacher's Professional Identity, was published in 2012. She can be contacted at Hawley.diane.edla@ocha.ac.jp