IJS Lecture: Hilary Holbrow, "The Future is Foreign: Women and Immigrants in Corporate Japan"

The Institute for Japanese Studies presents:

"The Future is Foreign: Women and Immigrants in Corporate Japan"

Hilary Holbrow
Indiana University

Abstract: Japan's foreign population has grown exponentially since the liberalization of its border control policy in 1989. But, because political discourse paints the foreign population as temporary, research on non-citizens' experiences and outcomes relative to comparable Japanese is in its infancy. In this talk, I discuss how white-collar migrants from Asia and the West fare after finding employment in elite Japanese firms, exploring the extent to which they evade, or remain constrained by, existing patterns of inequality. I find that women, regardless of national origin, fall to the bottom of the stratification hierarchy, while immigrant men experience little or no disadvantage. The study demonstrates that, despite Japan’s reputation for xenophobia, in contemporary white-collar workplaces gender is a far sharper axis of inequality than is foreign origin.

Hilary J. Holbrow is Assistant Professor of Japanese Politics and Society at Indiana University. A sociologist by training, her scholarship examines gender inequality, work and organizations, and immigration. She is an International Research Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo, an Associate in Research at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute, and a member of the US-Japan Network for the Future. She is currently conducting survey, survey-experimental, and interview research to understand the sources of persistent gender inequality in Japan’s white-collar workplaces. Holbrow’s book, The Future is Foreign: Women and Immigrants in Corporate Japan is forthcoming from Cornell University Press, and her previous research has been published in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, International Migration Review, Work and Occupations, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.