Hilary Holbrow

Assistant Professor of Japanese Politics and Society

Hilary J. Holbrow is Assistant Professor of Japanese Politics and Society in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Indiana University Bloomington. A sociologist by training, her scholarship examines social and economic inequality, work and organizations, immigration, and the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity. She is an International Research Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo, an Associate in Research at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute, and a member of the US-Japan Network for the Future.

Her book manuscript on gender and ethnic inequality in Japanese white-collar workplaces explores how status hierarchies evolve in response to changing and economic and social conditions, and specifically whether Japanese women and immigrants will be able to achieve greater parity with Japanese men as Japan’s population declines. She is currently conducting survey, survey-experimental, and interview research to understand the sources of persistent gender inequality in Japan’s white-collar workplaces, the experiences of professional Asian migrants to Japan, and the effects of Japan’s trainee system on migrant outcomes. Her previous research has been published in International Migration Review, Work and Occupations, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Expertise

  • Japanese society;
  • work and organizations;
  • gender;
  • race and ethnicity;
  • immigration

Current Research Interests

Organizations, economic sociology, migration, inequality, and East Asian societies

citation engraving
“Economic action is ‘social’ insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course.”— Max Weber