The demand for further expansion of women’s participation in the workforce has become an increasingly pressing issue in 21st century Japan due to the country’s shrinking labor force and economy. How will gender relations and family behavior be affected by the expected increase in female labor force participation? How can policies effectively support these changes and help structuring Japan’s new social model? Dr. Fukuda will address the issue of gender gaps in economic opportunities and the latest policy initiatives on gender and family formation in Japan. He will also discuss how gender equity can be achieved in Japan’s gender revolution.

Setsuya FUKUDA is a social demographer and full-time researcher at the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research where he conducts demographic research on the inter-relationships between gender, family formation and family policy. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Meiji University. After graduate study, he worked as a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany (2008-2011). From 2011-13, he worked in the government as an expert in the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, analyzing governmental statistics. In 2014-15, he received an Abe fellowship, and conducted a US-Japan comparative study on educational differentials in marriage at the Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison. His current research focuses on gender role division, couples’ well-being and fertility in international comparative settings, looking, in particular, at how Japan’s gender structure is going to change in relation to population decline and new family policies developed in “Abenomics”.

Dr. Fukuda is travelling the US as a member of the New Voices from Japan (NVJ) program, which is administered by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) with funding from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF).