Sociolinguistic Survey

Assignment Task 2: Sociolinguistic survey.

Gender-neutral language in the job’s titles: occupational stereotypes in Japan.

Introduction.

In these days of economical globalization in contemporary Japan English is slowly becoming part of everyday life. For example, most of international companies based in Tokyo use English as a communication language; moreover some Japanese traditional companies who are doing business globally use written English to communicate with their international business partners. However, economic development and modernization can’t assure gender equality.

In the past, most of the surveys in occupational stereotypes have been done outside of Japan, mainly the countries where the English is a first language, as a result,

Due to my current geographical location my survey was conducted in Japan, Tokyo. The participants of this survey are twenty-four (12 female and 12 males) Japanese bilinguals; their age from 25 to 65 years old. Currently all of them are working in different industries, and employed by various international and Japanese companies in Japan, Tokyo. The participants are my colleagues, acquaintances and friends; they have almost same educational background (University educated) and socioeconomic status. However, this research doesn’t focus on educational, socioeconomic, age or other factors apart from the gender.

Most of the surveys on occupational stereotypes have been done in the UK and USA (Cameron, 2005, p. 499). Therefore, I think it would be interesting to examine the phenomenon in Japan, where the labour force is open and officially giving an equal opportunity to both men and women (Adachi, 2013, p.641). However, according to the Global Gender Gap Report, Japan’s 2012 gender gap indicates complete inequality. The aim of this survey is identity existence of jot-titles stereotypes in Japan, and whether the male and females see occupational stereotypes differently than in previous studies.

Results and

54% male biased and 42% gender-neutral), even though half of the participants were females, and some of them had been students themselves just a few years ago. Furthermore, a few surprising replies were recorded regarding the position of “the person who cleans”, where some of the participants named “housewife” and “homemaker”. However the results of the survey demonstrate that “the person who cleans” is a male dominated bias job (Table 2. 71% male biased and 79% gender-neutral), along with “person who is in charge of school” (Table 2. 87% male biased and 87% gender-neutral) and “person who delivers letter” (Table 2. 83% male biased and 54% gender-neutral). These results support the second (“2”) hypothesis of this survey: the occupations/jobs titles have a strong connection to the gender stereotypes in