Tuesday marks International Women’s Day, which honors the political, cultural and historical impact women have had on the world, but reports once again show that Japan still has significant work to do to achieve gender equality, especially in the workplace.
Japan ranked 120th out of 156 countries in the World Economic Forum’s gender gap ranking in 2021, remaining in last place among advanced economies, due to particularly low scores in the political and economic arenas.
And government data has shown that, as with other countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it harder for women in Japan — who have already been at a disadvantage compared with men — to participate in the work force.
Internal affairs ministry data shows that women’s participation in the labor force had been on the rise for years — growing from 57% in 2001 to 70.9% in 2019 for women age between 15 and 64, compared with around 80% for men. That’s above the average of 61.3% in 2019 for member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Nonetheless, many Japanese women tend to quit their jobs upon giving birth and often cannot later resume stable employment, instead ending up in relatively low-paid nonpermanent positions.
But in the years before the pandemic, more women had opted to continue working after having children. Women’s participation in the labor force tends to dip between the ages of 30 and 35, which is typically when they are taking care of young children, but in recent years that dip was not as steep as it was before.
However, the arrival of the pandemic, which prompted the government to close down schools from around March through June in 2020, saw many working mothers lose their jobs or forced to quit to take care of their children at home.
In April 2020, the number of women in the workforce declined about 700,000 compared with the previous month, nearly twice the figure for men — about 390,000.
And even though the wage gap between men and women has been narrowing over the years, the average salary level of female workers in 2020 stood at 74.3% of the level for men.
The pandemic has particularly affected single mothers, many of whom have lost their jobs, according to Shintaro Yamaguchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo who has analyzed labor force survey data.
Yamaguchi and other researchers estimate that the school closures early in the pandemic pushed up the jobless rate for single mothers by about 3 percentage points.
Setting aside the pandemic, the percentage of women in corporate management positions is still low compared with other countries.
According to data published by the OECD, the percentage of female executives in Japanese companies stood at 10.7% in 2020, the lowest among the members of the Group of Seven.
Although the government is pushing companies to provide opportunities for women to reach management positions, many women are unable to take the same corporate career path as men. One of the reasons behind this is the fact that about half of all female workers are in nonpermanent work, including contract or part-time employment, essentially barring them from future management positions.
Japan also ranks last in the OECD and G7 for the number of female politicians. With the ratio of women in the Lower House standing at 10.2% as of September, Japan was ranked 165th place out of 190 countries, according to data from the Lower House and the Inter-Parliamentary Union. In contrast, the average proportion of female lawmakers in G7 countries stands at around 30%.
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