Keiko Hirao, Ph.D.
Dr. Keiko Hirao is a professor at the Faculty of Humanities at Shirayuri University and a professor emerita at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan.
Her research interest includes social sustainability, construction of environmental issues, intergenerational relations, and gender and environment. She is currently involved in a project, among others, that evaluates gender sensitivities in disaster management.
She has written extensively on intersections between and among family, education, and the labor market in Japan. She is the author of Child Rearing War Front (Chobunsha 1991), chapters in Women's Working Lives in East Asia (Stanford University Press 2001), Political Economy of Japan's Low Fertility (Stanford University Press, 2006), Working and Mothering: Images, Ideologies, and Identities (NIAS Press,2007). Her recent book, Invisible Hands and Invisible Heart (Sophia University Press 2015) discusses the structural undervaluation of care work vis-à-vis pecuniary activities. She also co-authored Families, Family Policies, and Sustainable Development Goals (UNICEF 2019), a policy tool that evaluates family policies worldwide across the six SDGs.
Dr. Hirao studied American Studies as an undergraduate at Nanzan University, and earned an MA in International Relations and PhD in Sociology at University of Notre Dame.