Gender, work, and mobility: Experiences of young skilled Taiwanese women in Tokyo headquarters

Over the past decade, the number of white-collar migrants employed in Japan’s corporate headquarters has increased notably. While previous research underscores the challenges Japanese firms face in attracting and retaining foreign professionals, the rapidly growing presence of skilled migrants calls for renewed attention to Japan’s continued appeal. Focusing on young, college-educated Taiwanese women, this study examines why they move from a society ranked as having higher gender equality to one ranked with lower gender equality, and how they navigate their careers within Japan’s gendered corporate structures. Drawing on multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews with 22 participants conducted between 2017 and 2020, the analysis situates their experiences at the intersection of gendered employment and skilled migration. The findings show that their decisions to pursue cross-border careers are influenced by Japan’s relaxed immigration policies for high-skilled migrants and corporate initiatives promoting women’s participation. In addition, distinctive employment practices—favoring new graduates and de-emphasizing academic specialization—further attracted women from humanities and social science backgrounds facing limited career options in Taiwan. This paper argues that Taiwanese college-educated women exercise contingent forms of agency in negotiating gender, work and mobility through transnational careers. While participants valued Japan’s employment stability and structured career paths, they also encountered enduring gender hierarchies and divisions of labor that constrained professional advancement. Through subtle forms of cultural negotiation—balancing pressures to assimilate into Japanese workplace norms with efforts to preserve individual agency—they sought to develop careers compatible with persistent gender role expectations shared across Taiwan and Japan.