Dear All,

A couple of days ago I sent an email about organizing a panel at the AAA conference this year on working women in Japan. I am a fifth-year PhD student in anthropology at Yale University working with Professor William Kelly. My research is on white-collar professional women in Japan. I came back from fieldwork in Tokyo a couple of months ago and now I am writing my thesis on "Japanese Professional Women:
Through the Labyrinth of their Working Lives."

I plan to organize a panel for the coming AAA conference in Montreal/Canada, November 16-20, on "Portraits of Working Women in Recessionary Japan." Please let me know if you would be interested in giving a paper in this panel. Attached I am sending you an abstract for the panel (Word Document). If you would like to participate in this panel, please send me an abstract or outline of your paper. The AAA deadline for submission of papers is April 15.

Please contact me DIRECTLY at .
Thank you very much in advance. I look forward hearing back from you.

Sincerely yours,
Anne Aronsson

Panel Abstract

Japanese labor markets for women are currently in turmoil. Women find themselves forced to fight institutionalized prejudice in order to be accepted as equals in the workforce. Indeed, despite the fact that Japanese women have been employed in professional career tracks for decades, due in part to the 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Law, they continue to suffer from discrimination in the workplace. Since the Japanese economic recession of the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as more women have sought to establish full-time careers, without leaving the workforce to dedicate themselves entirely to their husbands and children. In fact, the subsequent economic recession resulted in an increased number of women in the work force as the downturn led to a liberalization of certain career paths that fit many women's tendencies to engage in short-term and part-time work. Employment trends in Japan indicate that more and more professional women are increasingly breaking through the "glass ceiling" as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. The occupational changes present this generation of professional women with a new set of challenges as they contest conventional notions of femininity and negotiate new gender roles and cultural meanings.

What motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in today's recessionary economy and how are they reconfiguring notions of selfhood in this pursuit? This panel seeks to explore the gendered dilemmas these women confront on a daily basis and examines how conventional family ties have been undermined by a neoliberal global economy that accentuates the fluidity of this process. Japanese women are just beginning to redefine what it means for them to have a career while the career paths for Japanese white-collar men remains fairly standardized. Japanese women remain underrepresented in many different career tracks, leaving them to creatively redefine what it means to have a career in what is still a male-dominated sphere. To the extent that Japan is part of this trend, financial, industrial, governmental and entrepreneurial institutions are making policy adjustments in order to compete in this global economy. This panel aims to contextualize these women's agencies within multidimensional fields of particular social, economic, and political contexts, focusing on the study and analysis of how the meanings of Japanese womanhood are created in everyday life.

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Anne Stefanie Aronsson
Ph.D. Candidate
Yale University
Department of Anthropology