Doctoral Research Webinar: Weaving a Modern Workforce: How Female Industrial Pioneers Refined Women’s Economic Role in Japan

Early industrialization created a tension between new economic opportunities and traditional social norms that confined women to the domestic sphere. Xinxian Li, Research PhD Candidate of HKU Business School, examines how female industrial pioneers helped mediate this tension by prompting more women to participate in factory employment during the early industrialization in late 19th to early 20th century Japan. The female industrial pioneers emerged in the first modern model factory, Tomioka Silk Mill, thanks to the French technology transmission in 1872. Xinxian finds that these pioneers catalyzed their home regions’ female labor force participation by 1920. And this effect is not confined to silk industry but spilled over to other public sectors. As a placebo, the pioneers did not affect female workforce in the traditional agriculture. During this Quantitative History Doctoral Research Webinar, he will further elaborate that the pioneering effect arises from two mechanisms: one is that the pioneers diffused new technical skills that nurtured more factory jobs for women, and the other is they acted as role models that encouraged more females to work outside the home. These role models cast a long-lasting impact that extends to contemporary times. Their home municipalities still witnessed higher female labor force participation and more favorable social attitudes toward women than the other areas by 2000.