Education and Workforce Participation
Gender inequality, however, continues in family life, the workplace, and popular values. The notion expressed in the proverbial phrase "good wife, wise mother," continues to influence beliefs about gender roles. Most women may not be able to realize that ideal, but many believe that it is in their own, their children's, and society's best interests that they stay home to devote themselves to their children, at least while the children are young. Many women find satisfaction in family life and in the accomplishments of their children, gaining a sense of fulfilment from doing good jobs as household managers and mothers. In most households, women are responsible for their family budgets and make independent decisions about the education, careers, and life-styles of their families. Women also take the social blame for problems of family members.
Women's educational opportunities have increased in the twentieth century. Among new workers in 1989, 37% of women had received education beyond upper-secondary school, compared with 43% of men, but most women have received their postsecondary education in junior colleges and technical schools rather than in universities and graduate schools (see Education in Japan).
Read more about this topic: Japanese Women
Famous quotes containing the words education and and/or education:
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
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“The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)