Presentation Details of the International Symposium (Nov 15, 2024)

Title:
“Gender Dynamics in high-tech startups: An intersectional perspective on leadership in transnational entrepreneurship”

Abstract:
IT and technology are presumably male professional fields, as is entrepreneurship. Professional migration, too, is supposedly male-dominated. However, at a time that knowledge economies around the world are competing for innovation and, with this aim in mind, are attracting foreign professionals to their growing innovation and startup scenes, a rising number of female startup founders are migrating to hubs of innovation, including rapidly diversifying Tokyo. This presentation uses an intersectional approach and analyses how the ‘triple disadvantage’ of being a foreigner and migrant and of being a woman in the gendered Japanese business context affects female founders’ business activities, and contrasts them to those of male founders. Integrating household and family issues into the analysis the presentation how female and male founders balance dual careers and child raising issues abroad, which in turn affect their capacity to manage their firm venture. Based on data from ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with 40 transnational startup founders in Tokyo the presentation illustrates transnational entrepreneurs’ ways to manoeuvre the gendered assumptions and institutionalized practices in the knowledge-intensive startup sector. It asks if and how gendered family dynamics change through transnational professional mobility while interrogating women’s rationales regarding career and leadership development in particular. Findings reveal how (sometimes gendered) networks help or obstruct the founding process, and discuss how gender, intersecting with other social identities such as race, nationality, legal status in the country of residence, and migration channel (student, work-related, spousal) impact on the way foreign professionals establish themselves as foreign startup founders. The presentation proposes several strategies that female migrants devise in the pursuit of business development and thereby contributes to a better understanding of (un)changing family dynamics in transnational migration and the way foreign entrepreneurs navigate the entrenched gender norms of Japan’s labour market institutions.

Title:

“(In)visible Inequalities: Gender and Immigrant Background in Elite Japanese Firms”

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.

Title:
“Immigration, the identity-binary and the future of Japan”

Abstract:One of the most resilient notions reified in the post-war Japanese society is that Japan is a racially homogeneous island nation. Because of this ethnonationalist ideology, Japan had resisted immigration for decades. However, confronted with increasing demographic crises and skills shortages, Japan has been treading a pragmatic pathway to becoming an immigrant society. This pragmatic pathway involves two parallel processes. The first process is at the national government level. Over the decades, Japan has created and modified policies to gradually widen the channels of immigration and settlement. The second process is societal, taking place in the labor market, neighborhoods and local governments. Despite being a de facto immigrant society, the no-immigration discourse and particularly the identity-binary of “Japanese” vs “foreigner” prevent Japan’s social changes. This presentation discusses the influence this identity-binary has in different realms of immigrants’ life, pointing out that such a binary signals distinction and exclusion, prohibiting immigrants from cultivating a sense of belonging. It has created difficulty in identity formation for children of immigrants and neglects the multiethnic and multicultural individuals already existing in Japan. With the increasing immigration and more and more immigrants settling in Japan, it might be time to think who qualifies for the social identity of Japanese? What are the contents of this identity “Japanese”? When will an immigrant child stop being a foreigner? The expanding presence and increasing visibility of immigrants and people of mixed heritage in Japan’s social and cultural life have challenged Japan’s normative ethno-nationalist identity, calling for a search for a new self-understanding at the societal level.