The ninth session of the university-wide general education course "The Work of a Scientist and Career Development: Learning from the Career Histories of Female Researchers" was a lecture by Professor Tomoko Komagawa of the Department of Professional Ability Development, Graduate School of Education, and the theme was "Career and Gender." Professor Komagawa said that the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake prompted her to decide to pursue graduate studies, thinking, "I only have one life, so I'll do what I really want to do." Her specialty is labor sociology, and she particularly researches career and gender. In this class, in addition to introducing her research, she used gender as an analytical perspective and conducted group work using newspaper articles. Through the group work, students realized that even in newspaper articles featuring researchers, feminine or masculine language is chosen and used to describe them in accordance with the gender roles expected by the recipient (society), and it seems to have been an opportunity for them to become aware of gender bias hidden in everyday life. I think this was training for students to view issues they will face in the future as societal problems, rather than individual problems, such as "How does gender inequality arise?" and "What are the mechanisms that create career disparities?" Thank you, Professor Komagawa!
The next session, on June 26th, will feature a presentation by Professor Hanako Uta from the Department of Basic Research, Faculty of Agriculture, titled "An Introduction to Reproductive Biology Research."
