Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants women like Tomo Tamai to go back to work.
Tamai is eager to do so, nearly two years after her first child was born, but so far the 35-year-old former national government employee has only been able to find an internship.
Abe, who took office a year ago, has made the advancement of women a pillar of his economic revival policies in the most aggressive and ambitious initiative to back the rise of Japanese women in years. Tamai’s struggles show why doubts remain about whether it is enough to overcome entrenched discrimination in the workplace.
“It is a bunch of flag-waving,” said Tamai, who holds a doctorate in literature from Nihon University. “I don’t see how he has the vision to realize the goal of helping us, those people struggling to raise a child, working and doing housework.”
The government is beefing up childcare. It is encouraging companies to grant three years of maternity leave, or flexible hours during that period. It is also asking publicly held companies to promote women to leadership positions so they hold 30 percent of such posts by 2020.
Although women make up 40 percent of Japan’s workers, they face discrimination in hiring, promotion and pay. On average, a Japanese woman makes 70 percent of a man’s wages for equal work, according to government data.
The government also says women held just 12 percent of private-sector managerial jobs last year and fared even worse at higher levels, making up only 5 percent of section chiefs. Some critics and women workers say they tend to be confined to second-class status, not taken seriously for what is considered “a man’s job.”
They are underrepresented in government as well, comprising 11 percent of the more powerful lower house of parliament, 18 percent of the upper house and just 2.5 percent of managerial positions among public servants.
Japan has a less fluid workforce than many Western countries, because employees tend to stay loyal to one company for life. That puts women at a disadvantage because they tend to take time off to have children and are then consigned to lower-rung jobs, analysts say. Sixty percent of working women quit after their first child is born.
The Geneva-based World Economic Forum ranked Japan 105th out of 136 nations in this year’s Global Gender Gap Report, which measures economic equality and political participation. Iceland was No. 1, followed by the Scandinavian nations. Germany was 14th and the US 23rd.
Women make up 3.9 percent of board members of listed Japanese companies, compared with 12 percent in the US and 18 percent in France, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“Most major companies are not serious about utilizing the talent of women,” said Junko Fukasawa, a senior managing director at Tokyo job-referral company Pasona Group, which is unusual in having three women on its 11-member board. “They are very male-dominated.”
When Fukasawa meets people from other companies, they often turn first to her male underlings to exchange business cards and are surprised to learn later that she is the boss. People on the telephone have demanded to speak with a man and she has had to tell them she is in charge, she said.
Under Fukasawa’s leadership at human resources, Pasona has set up counseling for women executives and mentor programs. Male employees are encouraged to take paternity leave, dubbed a “hello baby vacation.”
Pasona has been deluged with queries from other companies trying to tackle Abe’s initiative, and turned the counseling on such requests into a new business.
One factor that may help women is demographics. Japan’s birth rate is so low that the world’s third-largest economy is running out of workers. Kathy Matsui, an analyst at Goldman Sachs Japan who invented the term “womenomics” to describe how working women can lift an economy, projects Japan’s workforce would expand by 8.2 million people if the gender gap were closed, boosting GDP by up to 15 percent.
During a recent trip to Tokyo, US Vice President Joe Biden visited DeNA, a video game and e-commerce company founded by a woman, and drove home Abe’s message of promoting women.
“Women are half the sky. They are half the brainpower. They are half the energy. They’re half the innovation,” Biden said.
More than 300 companies surveyed by Keidanren, an organization representing Japan’s top 1,300 companies, promised to abide by Abe’s call for childcare, flexible hours and awareness training.
However, no major company has responded with a high-profile female posting, even as the first female chief executive at General Motors makes headlines in the US. No Japanese company is among the 23 Fortune 500 companies run by women.
Kaoru Sunada, a workplace expert at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, said some internships and affirmative action programs are only for show. He said women are sometimes let go as soon as the programs are completed and that the problem of highly educated, but jobless females is growing.
Emi Shitara, a graduate of a top women’s university who speaks six languages, applied to 50 places while in college and did not land a single job. Her main luck has been with temporary work for foreign employers such as the UN and the Harvard Kennedy School. Now 33, she is considering graduate school in the US.
The fight toward equality has been tough for Japanese women. The right to vote came only in 1945, more than two decades after their US sisters. A law to protect gender equality in employment was passed only in 1985 and it has been criticized as largely toothless.
Some companies are reluctant to invest in women employees because they worry they will leave, said Katsura Tottori, a senior operating officer who oversees diversity at Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co.
Nearly 30 years ago, Tottori took only six weeks off after her first child and eight weeks after her second. These days, Otsuka allows 18 months of maternity leave.
Even with such changes, the biggest challenge lies in changing the thinking of family members, Tottori said. Cultural stereotyping favors the docile female who dotes upon men, raises the children and does all the cooking and cleaning.
Kumiko Nemoto, associate professor of sociology at Western Kentucky University, is studying the attitudes toward working women at several major Japanese companies.
Even women prefer male bosses, Nemoto said. She said they have grown accustomed to “eroticizing” their career paths, playing a feminine role with higher-ups to get ahead.
“The culture of the housewife is dominant,” she said. “Women’s ambitions are shaped by their limited opportunities.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema