Badante or bride? : Patterns of female migration in Italy, Japan, Korea, and Spain

This article investigates the intersection of care and migration regimes by comparing four carefully matched familialist countries—Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Spain. These four countries, while sharing a similar familialist culture and welfare regime, responded to the problem of eldercare deficits differently in the 1990s and the 2000s. Italy and Spain developed a ‘migrant-in-the-family model,’ relying heavily on informal eldercare provided by migrant workers whom Italians colloquially call badante. Korea and Japan, by contrast, relied more on marriage migrants, with Korea developing its own variant of the migrant-in-the-family model where the migrant is typically the daughter-in-law. In Japan, some marriage migrants became care workers in the formal eldercare sector. By tracing the historical trajectories of female migration to these four countries, the article identifies a recursive relationship between migration regimes and care regimes. Initial differences in migration regimes shaped the female migratory pathways in specific ways, which, in turn, affected the development of distinctive eldercare regimes. Once these new care regimes emerged, however, they influenced the migration regime in the next cycle. The article contributes to the literatures on the intersection of care and migration regimes by untangling the reciprocal feedback processes between these two systems

Mission Completed? Changing Visibility of Women's Colleges in England and Japan and Their Roles in Promoting Gender Equality in Science

The global community, from UNESCO to NGOs, is committed to promoting the status of women in science, engineering and technology, despite long-held prejudices and the lack of role models. Previously, when equality was not firmly established as a key issue on international or national agendas, women’s colleges played a great role in mentoring female scientists. However, now that a concerted effort has been made by governments, the academic community and the private sector to give women equal opportunities, the raison d’être of women’s universities seems to have become lost. This paper argues otherwise, by demonstrating that women’s universities in Japan became beneficiaries of government initiatives since the early 2000s to reverse the low ratio of women in scientific research. The paper underscores the importance of the reputation of women’s universities embedded in their institutional foundations, by explaining how female scientific communities take shape in different national contexts. England, as a primary example of a neoliberal welfare regime, with its strong emphasis on equality and diversity, promoted its gender equality policy under the auspices of the Department of Trade and Industry. By contrast, with a strong emphasis on family values and the male-breadwinner model, the Japanese government carefully treated the goal of supporting female scientists from the perspective of the equal participation of both men and women rather than that of equality. Following this trend, rather contradictorily, women’s universities, with their tradition of fostering a ‘good wife, wise mother image, began to be highlighted as potential gender-free institutions that provided role models and mentoring female scientists. By drawing on the cases of England and Japan, this paper demonstrates how the idea of equality can be framed differently, according to wider institutional contexts, and how this idea impacts on gender policies.Author has checked copyrightAM