How do Gendered Promotion Processes of Government Agencies Impact Family Policy?

• In Event: Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Comparative Context

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explain how the promotion process of women managers in local government agencies impacts family policies—i.e. government programs, laws, and other strategies designed to promote marriage, reproduction, and raising children—by analyzing data collected from local governments in Japan, using the theory of representative bureaucracy (Riccucci and Meyers 2004) and organizational theory (Popielarz and Neal 2007), with a focus on intra-organizational competition.
Recent studies in political science and public policy have examined how identities such as race, ethnicity, and gender play a role in the political process. However, minimal research (Barnes et al. 2016) has addressed the degree to which these factors impact policy performance, i.e. the types and efficacy of policies enacted, due to the fact that most research on identity and political outcomes has focused on political representation.
Furthermore, there has been no systematic study of how gender interacts with intra-organizational competition and how both affect family policy performance. A few previous studies have explored how gendering human resource management in local government agencies affects policy outcomes.
Japan is a case of particular interest for two reasons. One is because of the distinct policy process characteristics of organizations in Japan, which include collective, bottom-up decision making and limited role specialization in which employees experience many job positions within an organization over time. This makes for a distinctive environment in which to examine how social identity like gender plays an important role in the policy process. The other is that it is easy to identify the net gendered organizational effect on policy outcomes as the Abe Administration is seeking to promote the participation of more women in the formal labor force, for example, by setting a target for public administration organizations to have approximately 30% of managerial positions filled by women.
In my research, I analyze time-series cross-sectional data on admission adjustments of childcare facilities in major cities in Japan, the ratio of women managers in local government agencies as published by the Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office, combined with an index of intra-organizational competition, by using synthetic control methods (SCM) (N=720). In addition to SCM, I estimate the treatment effect by using a difference in difference method. Furthermore, I conducted in-depth interviews with women managers and carried out a case study using HRM personnel change data collected from Aichi Prefecture, one of the biggest local governments in Japan, to further explore the mechanism of variations in the policy outcomes. The analysis shows how the interaction between gender and intra-organizational competition, such as whether a woman is assigned a key role, affects municipal strategies for addressing childcare needs under the decentralized childcare system in Japan. These results increase our understanding of how inequalities in childcare provision are generated via policy implementation through bureaucratic representativeness affected by intra-organizational competition.

Pamela A. Popielarz and Zachary P. Neal, 2007. “The Niche as a Theoretical Tool” Annual Review of Sociology 33(1): 65-84

Author

• Reiko Arami, Nagoya University