An Alternative Approach for Investigating Gender Prejudice in Japan

Japan is famous for its male-dominated politics. As of September 2015, female representatives consisted of just 9.5 percent of Lower House members, which ranked 155th among 190 countries. Local politics is even more male dominated. Women were just 8.9 percent of members of prefectural assemblies in 2014. One possible reason for this underrepresentation is sexism among voters that manifests in views on traditional sexual roles in division of labor. In political science, the experimental method is widely used to reveal such gender prejudices. However, it is rarely applied to Japanese politics. One exception is the work of Ono and Yamada, who used a conjoint analysis to examine the effects of candidate attributes and to estimate gender prejudices. Although conjoint analysis has many advantages, it is based on fictional settings and thus strongly relies on the imagination of each respondent. In this paper, I propose a new experimental method to investigate gender prejudice. This method utilizes advanced voice morphing techniques. By changing parameters, we can transform female candidate speech to make it sound like male candidate speech. Using these new experimental stimuli, I investigate gender prejudices and gender stereotyping among voters and possible strategic reactions by female candidates.