The future(s) of unpaid work: How susceptible do experts from different backgrounds think the domestic sphere is to automation?

The future of work has become a prominent topic for research and policy debate. However, the debate has focused entirely on paid work, even though people in industrialized countries on average spend comparable amounts of time on unpaid work. The objectives of this study are therefore (1) to expand the future of work debate to unpaid domestic work and (2) to critique the main methodology used in previous studies. To these ends, we conducted a forecasting exercise in which 65 AI experts from the UK and Japan estimated how automatable are 17 housework and care work tasks. Unlike previous studies, we applied a sociological approach that considers how experts' diverse backgrounds might shape their estimates. On average our experts predicted that 39 percent of the time spent on a domestic task will be automatable within ten years. Japanese male experts were notably pessimistic about the potentials of domestic automation, a result we interpret through gender disparities in the Japanese household. Our contributions are providing the first quantitative estimates concerning the future of unpaid work and demonstrating how such predictions are socially contingent, with implications to forecasting methodology.

Married Adults Coresiding with Older Parents: Implications for Paid Work and Domestic Workloads.

The rise of life expectancy throughout the developed world has meant that older adults play an increasingly important role in their grown-up children's lives. We evaluate whether the intergenerational solidarity theory is useful for understanding the intergenerational transfers of time in Japan given the relatively generous welfare provision for the older adults and the fall in intergenerational coresidence. We apply seemingly unrelated regression models to data of the 2006 Japanese Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities (Statistics Bureau Japan, 2006) to investigate how coresidence patterns are associated with paid and unpaid work time of adult married children. The sample contains 23,226 married couples where both husband and wife are aged 20 to 59. We find evidence of intergenerational solidarity in coresident households. We also find that "doing gender" is layered through intergenerational exchanges of support between married working-age children and their older parents. Working-age women's time use patterns are associated with coresidence arrangements and care needs of their older relatives to a much greater extent than working-age men's. The observed patterns are consistent with healthy older women supporting their daughters' careers in exchange for care when they need help themselves. For working-age men, the patterns are not very pronounced. Notably, working-age husbands without children appear to be more responsive to their older the parents' care needs, suggesting that fatherhood may be associated with solidifying gendered role performance within Japanese couples.

Exploring daily time-use patterns: ATUS-X data extractor and online diary visualization tool.

Time-use data can often be perceived as inaccessible by non-specialists due to their unique format. This article introduces the ATUS-X diary visualization tool that aims to address the accessibility issue and expand the user base of time-use data by providing users with opportunity to quickly visualize their own subsamples of the American Time Use Survey Data Extractor (ATUS-X). Complementing the ATUS-X, the online tool provides an easy point-and-click interface, making data exploration readily accessible in a visual form. The tool can benefit a wider academic audience, policy-makers, non-academic researchers, and journalists by removing accessibility barriers to time use diaries.

Singlehood in contemporary Japan: Rating, dating, and waiting for a good match.

BACKGROUND: Late age at marriage and rising rates of singlehood increasingly characterize East Asian societies. For Japan, these are major contributors to the very low birth rate. OBJECTIVE: We analyze two unique data sets: dating records covering a two-year period from one of Japan's largest marriage agencies and in-depth interviews with 30 highly-educated Japanese singles. The longitudinal nature of the quantitative data allows us to test hypotheses about how single men's and women's preferences for partners' characteristics adjust over time. The qualitative data provides a more fine-grained look at Japanese singles' partner preferences. METHODS: We employ fixed-effects regression models to analyze Japanese men's and women's preferences for the relative and absolute education, income, and age of potential marriage partners. RESULTS: Both the quantitative and qualitative data suggest that Japanese women continue to highly value men's income-earning capacity. Men, in contrast, value a partner with moderate income-earning potential. Women's and men's preferences for partner's education are somewhat weaker, and women broaden their educational preference over time. CONCLUSION: Japanese men's and women's preferences for a potential partner's characteristics are largely consistent with Becker's theory of gender-role specialization. But we also find evidence consistent with Oppenheimer's expectation that men are coming to value women's income-earning capacity more highly than in the past. CONTRIBUTION: We use a unique Japanese data set featuring dating records over a two-year period to examine the appropriateness of theories of marital sorting proposed by Becker and Oppenheimer. Our quantitative analysis is complemented by in-depth interviews with Japanese singles.

Japanese adolescents' time use: The role of household income and parental education.

BACKGROUND: How children spend their day is closely linked to their social and developmental outcomes. Children's time use is associated with their parents' educational and economic capital, making time use a potential reproduction channel for socioeconomic inequalities. OBJECTIVE: We evaluate the correlation of natal-family economic resources, parents' education, and children's daily time use in Japan. METHODS: Analysing data from a 2006 Japanese time use survey, we use natal-family income, parental education, and the interaction between them to predict in-school and afterschool study time, leisure time, and sleep time for children aged 10-18. RESULTS: Children from families with higher incomes and more-educated parents spend a longer time studying after school and less time on sleep and leisure. Parental income and mothers' and fathers' education are all independently associated with children's daily patterns. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that available resources and parental education are important in shaping children's daily routines and, through these routines, their eventual socioeconomic outcomes. CONTRIBUTION: This is the first article to simultaneously assess the impact of income and parental education on children's study, leisure, and sleep time. It is also the first paper to analyse children's time use and their natal-family characteristics in Japan.

Family Characteristics and Mate Selection: Evidence from Computer-Assisted Dating in Japan.

Research on mate selection rarely considers singles' preferences for their future partners' family configurations and experiences. Using online dating records from a major matchmaking agency in Japan, a society with a strong emphasis on family and kinship, we examine how singles' responses to date requests correspond to potential mates' family circumstances. Results from fixed-effects logit models are consistent with the argument that singles' preferences for potential partners' family characteristics stem from both a concern about future obligations toward the partner's family and stereotypes associated with certain family traits. Singles, for example, are less likely to accept requests from those from large families, which are seen as traditional. Being from a large family nevertheless hampers individuals' dating chances considerably more if they are firstborn and have no brothers, two conditions that make them the designated child to care for elderly parents. We also find that Japanese singles largely seek partners with more of the universally valued family traits, rather than traits similar to their own.