Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan’s Digital Economy

Over the past 10 years, a plethora of works have explored the position of women and gender roles in Japan (e.g. Iversen and Rosenbluth 2010; Rosenberger 2014; Nemoto 2016; Steel 2019). They each give Japanese women a voice in multiple social, economic, and political contexts. Gabriella Lukács’ Invisibility by Design adds to these influential works by investigating how digital technologies use and hide young women’s labor by taking advantage of inequalities in the local labor market and shows how technological developments are based on the socio-economic contexts in which they emerge. Lukács’ work is the latest addition to an emerging literature that explores new types of labor and the ways in which capitalist accumulation strives to make profits from activities not considered productive. She writes that ‘in Japan the digital economy evolved in parallel with the deregulation of the labor market’ (2), and, as such, the...