Suchergebnisse

Between 1975 and 1995, the singulate mean age at marriage in Japan increased from 24.5 to 27.7 years for women and from 27.6 to 30.7 years for men, making Japan one of the latest‐marrying populations in the world. Over the same period, the proportion of women who will never marry, calculated from age‐specific first‐marriage probabilities pertaining to a particular calendar year, increased from 5 to 15 percent for women and from 6 to 22 percent for men—behaviors sharply different from those characterizing the universal‐marriage society of earlier years. This article investigates how and why these changes have come about. The reasons are bound up with rapid educational gains by women, massive increases in the proportion of women who work for pay outside the home, major changes in the structure and functioning of the marriage market, extraordinary increases in the prevalence of premarital sex, and far‐reaching changes in values relating to marriage and family life.

Unpaid household work is vital for human reproduction and enables all other forms of work. However, debates about the "future of work" have yet to address unpaid work. In this article, we present first estimates of the impacts of "smart" and "AI" technologies on unpaid work. We ask what the likelihood is of various types of unpaid work being automated, and how this would change the time spent on domestic work and on the gendered division of labour. To achieve this, we adapt three established automation likelihood estimates for paid work occupations to estimate the automation likelihood of 19 unpaid work tasks. Applying these estimates to Japanese and UK national time use data, we find that 50-60% of the total time spent on unpaid work could be saved through automation. The savings are unevenly distributed: a woman aged 20-59 in Japan could save over 1,000 hours per year, whereas men in the UK could save 600 hours and men in Japan only 250 hours. Domestic automation could free up to 9.3% of women in Japan and 5.8% of women in the UK to take up full- or part-time employment, pointing to substantial potential economic and social gains from domestic automation.