Some Thoughts on International Women's Day
The #translation #industry is one of the few trades to have a reverse #gender #gap . There are more women than men in our industry.
The 2022 statistics from the Japan Translation Federation (sorry in Japanese only) also confirm this fact. Both the translation and interpreting industries are dominated by women, up to 70%.
This is no surprise to me. (We women are good at languages 😉.)
What alarmed me is the demographic distribution of translators by age and gender.
The female/male ratio inverted when translators reached their sixties. The dominant share of female translators in their fifties abruptly dropped off within ten years.
The number of female translators shrank from 220 to 56 upon moving from their fifties to sixties (n = 788) whereas the male translator population lost only a single person in the same comparison.
💡 Generally, women live longer than men and female-specific health conditions cannot be the reason for it. More likely, the health conditions of their PARENTS may play a role here.
My guess is that the traditional role of nursing elderly parents is falling mainly upon the shoulders of female translators and interpreters in Japan, and less so on male colleagues.
The statistics do not tell the exact story. But silent figures give me a lot of food for thought.
#JapanTranslationFederation #InternationalerFrauentag #GenderGap #GenderBias #TranslationServiceArai
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