Shams El-Mutwalli and Carla Chahrour Dubai 

In celebration of International Women’s Day, a global day that highlights the achievements of women, it is important to understand the current social and economic hardships faced by women in Japan, particularly within a corporate setting.

It can be said that the workplace is very much tethered to sexism, or sexist ideologies in Japan that play a fundamental role in how a woman’s position within the hierarchy is defined or evaluated.

Statistically, the percentage of women in senior and leadership posts stood at 15 percent in 2020. In the same year, Japan’s global ranking on gender equality fell to 121st out of 153 countries according to a World Economic Forum report.

The report illustrates how “one reason for this economic disparity is that women in Japan spend more than four times as much time as men on unpaid domestic work, which means less time to engage in paid labour or work longer hours, which could hold women back from career opportunities and advancements.”

A newsletter published by Deborah Guistini, researcher in Sociology at The University of Manchester and Peter Matanle, Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies and Director of Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield,  investigated this matter in 2019.

The newsletter outlined how “managerial track requires a strong commitment to organisational working practices and cultures as a requirement for progression,” and the set of practices is often determined by gender assumption, whereby women opt for part-time roles “in anticipation of childbirth and rearing.”

Another report by the World Economic Forum found that in Japan, 1 million women left the labour force between Dec. and April of 2020, influenced by unachievable expectations imposed upon them.

This goes against the fundamental purpose of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s initiative, “womenomics,” launched to facilitate growth of the work force by encouraging women to take on roles in economy and politics. 

The aim for “womenomics” was to raise the percentage of women in leadership posts to 30 percent by 2020, but that target has been postponed to 2030.

Despite efforts to remedy the ever-present gender issue in Japan, women continue to fight one of the hardest battles by actively asserting their roles despite the societal pushback they receive.   

Another reason behind the gender disparity in Japan’s workforce is due to uneven higher educational opportunities that are essential to the integration of women into traditionally male-dominated workplaces. During the 1980’s most women went from school to two year “junior colleges” rather than four-year universities, which were favoured by their male contemporaries.

This higher education imbalance meant that among the generation of people who are at the age from which firms select their leaders, the number of qualified women to choose from is relatively low. 

In the late 1990’s the paradigm for women’s higher education changed as the trend shifted from junior colleges to four-year universities, which could be partly attributed to the the Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1985 that was effective in April 1986, prohibitibing gender discrimination with respect to recruitment, hiring, promotion, training, and job assignment. Given that the increased opportunities available to women by the law predominantly benefited those with higher education, a noticeable shift in enrollment was seen in the years after 1985. 

Data on the enrollment in four-year Colleges and universities by sex from 1975-1990 from Japan’s Statistics Bureau of the Management and Coordination Agency showed that women’s enrollment accelerated during 1985-1990, which suggests that the Equal Employment Opportunity Law was an important contributing factor to the increase in the enrollment of women in higher education, as it altered their future expectations of the workforce and provided them with a greater incentive to invest in their education.

Subsequently, the status of women has gradually improved in relation to legal changes, but equal employment has not been achieved. The careers of women tend to be interrupted whenever family priorities, such as child or elderly care arise. This leaves those who choose to prioritize family over work with limited opportunities in the labour market, forcing them to accept part-time contracts, where the tax system encourages women to limit their working-hours.

Prior to 2018, an individual that made less than ¥1.03 million annually was exempted from paying an income tax and could be registered as dependent on their spouse’s tax return, which would allow the spouse with the higher income to claim an additional ¥380,000 spousal exemption (meaning a deduction of ¥380,000). Last year, this ceiling for tax deduction was raised to ¥1.5 million in order to encourage women to work more.

Additionally, as a result of patriarchal gender role expectations present, the Japanese women’s careers are generally less valued in comparison to men. Consequently, women tend to receive lower capital investment throughout their lifetime as this ideology prevents them from being internally employed and trained within organisations, constraining them in jobs that are positioned at the bottom of the organisational hierarchy.

This creates a vicious circle of gender-gaps where women are systematically under-valued within the workforce, generation over generation.

An even wider gap is seen in the fields of science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). The low representation of women in these fields also has its roots in education, where women are discouraged from pursuing such careers due to the androcentrism in STEM.

For example, according to a 2017 survey conducted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) in Japan, female undergraduates in the Faculty of Science represent 27.2% of the total, while female undergraduates in the Faculty of  Engineering represent only 14.5% of the total. 

Taking into consideration that Japan’s global recognition as being one of the leading countries in technology stems from the processes undertaken during the country’s postwar recovery in strengthening the fields STEM, the gender disparity found within the field inevitably poses big questions for the sustainability of the domain and the ability of the current structure to continue to sufficiently fill the necessary roles in the future.

The population of Japan is expected to decline to 104.9 million by 2050, according to the United Nations. The working age population o (15-64 years old) of the country is also projected to decline from 74.5 million in 2020 to 57.1 million in 2050, which indicates that the current dependence on a male workforce would be unsustainable in the future.

In 2019, the number of female job seekers in Japan was 2.62 million, which serves as an example of the large portion of un-utilized potential that could be contributing to the labor market and assist in filling the gap created by the predicted decline in the future working age population.

The “bamboo ceiling” a variation on the familiar term, “glass ceiling” that is typically used to describe the seemingly invisible barriers to equality that prevent individuals of Asian descent from advancing into leadership positions, is expected to start letting some light in as Japan faces the looming threat of depopulation, where the country will need to train and incorporate women into such fields as there will not be enough trained and experienced men to fill all the managerial positions.