Gender equality gains
support in male-dominated Japan
Since the 1980s, the Japanese have been concerned
about gender issues. This resulted
in a law passed by parliament in 1985 to ensure gender equality at work. In recent
years, however, there has been increasing
pressure on the government
to do more.
The number of working women in Japan is high to the
extent that one may get the
impression no gender gap exists.
But the bitter truth is that they
are still the last to be recruited with
obvious discrimination against
them in terms of posts and wages,
not to mention housing and other allowances, which are exclusively paid to the head
of the household who is presumably
the male.
According to a gender-gap survey
conducted last year by the World Economic Forum, Japanese women ranked 52nd and 54th out of 58 developed and emerging
economies in terms of economic and political
empowerment respectively. The percentage of women occupying management
positions in the world’s
second- largest economy has
not exceeded 10%, and only 30% of women keep their jobs after childbirth.
Another survey conducted
last year by the Cabinet
Office’s Gender Equality
Bureau revealed that 63% of
Japanese firms had no plans to recruit women, despite the latter’s proven
talents. This may partially
explain why only 11.6% of the country’s scientific researchers are women.
In
2000, Japan was ranked 41st in terms of gender equality out of 70
countries surveyed by the United Nation Development
Programme. The method used included four criteria: the ratio of seats women hold
in parliament, the ratio of
female administrators and managers, the ratio of female professionals and technical workers,
and the income
women earn.
This
indicates that Japan’s
position, despite numerous
efforts to improve the status of women, is still weak
when it comes
to gender equality. Japan is not only
far behind other developed and emerging
economies, such as South Korea, but also falls behind
some developing countries, such as the Philippines.
In
South Korea, for example, the status
of women is increasingly improving due to legislations on the promotion of women’s employment and the quota system, which provides that not less than
30% of candidates running in general elections be women.
But such a system is difficult to introduce in Japan because of a lack of
national consensus on the issue, according
to some officials. As a result, female candidates in the 2000 general elections, for example, accounted for 14.4% of the total runners and only
7.3% of those elected.
Factors behind gender gap include Japan’s highly structured society where the status of women
is subordinate to that of men and
the strictly male-dominated working environment. Another factor has been women’s weak participation in political
life and their consequent lack of power within the decision-making
institutions to impose changes.
Attached to gender discrimination is
domestic violence, an issue that
until the 1990s has been hidden by the Japanese
culture of shame. According
to a survey conducted in 2000
by the Prime Minister’s Office, 4.6% of women, or 1 out of 20, are subjected
to life-threatening violence. Japanese
writer Hiromi Ikeuchi argues that husbands’ violence against wives or fathers’ violence against daughters are mostly caused by “the nature of Japan’s highly stressful society”, not by alcohol
abuse, drug addiction, or poverty.
She believes that current laws
and penalties do not respond
to all problems because domestic
violence is often difficult to be discovered and because “the law does
not generally intervene in household problems”.
While gender equality is a challenging issue in many countries, it is of tremendous demographic and economic impact in Japan. Today, one in four females prefers not to get married or not to have children
because otherwise she is expected to quit her job and
stay at home to raise children. Poor child support for working mothers, prejudices within the working environment,
inflexible hours for working,
and the prevailing
tradition that only women should undertake
domestic chores prevent Japanese females from having
a family and a job simultaneously.
Because
of this, the fertility rate has been falling, making Japan’s birth rate one of the lowest in the
world. The total fertility
rate, which was around 2.1 in the 1960s and 1970s, fell to a record low of 1.29 in 2004. If the present trends continue, Japan’s population will shrink from
its present number of 127 million to 65 million by the
end of this century, according to demographers. Economists predict that the
declining population will negatively affect Japan’s economy
from 2010 onward, especially with its rapidly ageing
society.
The situation has forced Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to approve a new plan aimed at redressing
the perceived failures of a gender equality law enacted
20 years ago. But the plan is expected
to be slow, given the conservative camp’s
opposition.
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Academic researcher and lecturer on Asian affairs