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Gender Issues in Working Japan

Thursday, July 30, 2009 | Posted by Jay All around the world the issue of gender discrimination bears deep roots within history. With this idea in mind, I believe it is important to understand that the equalization of gender rights is a relatively recent issue, and will continue to be one of the most difficult challenges society has to offer. As I am currently an exchange student from the United States studying in Japan, and since I have a very real interest in entering the work force after I graduate from college (possibly even something to do with Japan), I decided to do a bit of digging.

Today, Japan is known to be one of the most modern countries in the world. Yet compared to the U.S., Japan has a much older history that reaches back thousands of years (I looked it up, and America is actually 233 years old as of July 4, 2009). Thus, while one considering the prospect of working in Japan might believe the typical Japanese company to be extremely modern and advanced, there are still quite a few traditions and customs that rule even the working environment. For instance, it is the custom to work for the same company for your entire life — unlike in the U.S., where working class citizens usually change jobs on an average of once every three years. Japanese companies also operate on a seniority wage system, which plays an important hand in calculating the wage differences in the company payroll. These two factors sound genuine enough, and on the surface should not affect working Japanese women. But let's dig a bit deeper.

Statistically, there are a larger number of part-time working women than there are part-time working men, and more women quit their jobs than men do. This is often attributed to reasons such as marriage, childbirth and childcare. Though Japanese companies maintain the tradition of keeping an employee in their service until said employee retires, this tradition is slightly fuzzy when it comes to women. Because of reasons such as marriage, childbirth and childcare, Japanese companies do not expect women to stay for very long. Generally, women are expected to marry by the age of 30 (not a written law or anything, just a custom). Once a woman gets married, she is expected to quit her job and rely on her husband for the better part, if not the entire part, of the household earnings. Once a woman has a child, she is not technically fired, but she is expected to quit her job to take care of her child. Even once the child has grown independent of the mother, the mother is not expected to return. With all these reasons for the woman to quit or discontinue work, it is not difficult to understand the large gender gap that exists among Japanese workers. Not only is the woman barred from the seniority wage system, but she is also socially barred from ever returning to the workforce by quitting a job that, theoretically at least, should've lasted her until retirement. Japanese women are not only restricted from the workforce by the Japanese-defined social role of a Japanese woman, but also by the common stereotype that women as a whole have no motivation to work.


In recent years, Japan has become more and more open to the image of the working woman. Even with the bulk of the female working force kept to the part-time sector, there are still some women who have been promoted within Japanese companies. Statistics illustrating the structure of the Japanese Labor Market indicates that this is true; yet at the same time it also indicates that almost no women are allowed into the management and administration level of any Japanese company. This may be attributed to the traditionally sexist perspective of women in the working force — "a woman is not really motivated to work." This type of reasoning is one step within a vicious cycle. Logically speaking, if an employee tries their utmost best to deliver what is required of them, they may expect a raise or some form of promotion for their efforts. However in Japan, should a woman follow such a path she will find herself hitting a "glass ceiling." No matter how hard the woman works, she generally will not receive that raise or promotion she deserves, while her male counterpart will receive all that and more in the future. Thus, the motivation to work drops, and the Japanese company top dogs check her off as yet another unmotivated female worker.

Motivation to work aside, there is still another internationally accepted qualifying characteristic (doesn't that just sound so official?) for any potential employee: education. This is probably one of the most equal-opportunity social institutions that Japan has to offer today. Statistically, women believe that the Japanese school system is virtually gender-blind, and that it is a system of merit based on high school and college entrance exams that analyze one's thinking ability over anything else. These thoughts are not unfounded. Many of the top Japanese universities average an almost fifty-fifty ratio of male and female students. With such facts in mind, I think it is safe to conclude that gender issues within the work force are not influenced by the quality of education in a woman's work resume, but rather by something else.

When I spoke with some of my Japanese friends at the Japanese university I've been attending, I realized two things: Japanese women are not unaware of the unfairness of the gender-related discriminations they face not only at work, but on a daily basis; and Japanese women are generally too tired or accustomed to accepting such unfair treatment of their own gender, and do not have the means to fight back.

In the U.S., gender discrimination has improved drastically since the first Women's Rights Movement that spanned from 1848 to 1920 (that's a 72 year-long gender war we're talking about). As a female American currently working a few part-time jobs while taking classes in university, the only real discrimination I notice in the working environment is the different social roles in dating, and which toilet I'm supposed to use. There are management positions filled by both men and women who were, in theory and in most of practice, promoted based on their own abilities and achievements. It truly is a disappointment to realize that some of the most amazing Japanese friends I've made are held back from these kinds of freedoms on the basis of their gender.

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