Women’s
lowly status in the Japanese workplace has barely improved in decades,
and the country suffers as a result. Shinzo Abe would like to change
that
Mar 29th 2014 | TOKYO
KAREN
KAWABATA represents the best of Japan’s intellectual capital. She has
just graduated from the University of Tokyo, the most prestigious in the
country. Wry and poised, with an American mother and Japanese father,
she has the languages and cosmopolitan attitude that Japanese companies
particularly value nowadays. In April she will join McKinsey, a
consultancy that should give her immediate membership of a
globe-trotting elite.
Yet
Ms Kawabata sees obstacles in her path. She is acutely aware of the
difficulties she would face at traditional Japanese companies, should
she find herself joining one. Ferociously long working hours, often
stretching past midnight, are followed by sessions of “nominication”, a
play on the Japanese word for drinking, nomu, and the English
word “communication”; these are where young hopefuls forge connections
and build reputations. Nowadays women trying to impress the boss are
allowed to drink plum wine mixed with plenty of soda instead of beer,
says Ms Kawabata. But that is hardly a great improvement.
Above
all, she worries that having a family will be nigh on impossible to
combine with a demanding career. When she met her boyfriend’s father for
the first time this year, she reassured him about her intentions at
McKinsey. “I told him that I would rethink my career in a few years’
time,” she says.
That
one of the brightest of Japan’s graduates needs to say such things
should worry Shinzo Abe, the prime minister. Japan educates its women to
a higher level than nearly anywhere else in the world: its girls come
near the top in education league-tables compiled by the OECD. But when
they leave university their potential is often squandered, as far as the
economy is concerned. Female participation in the labour force is 63%,
far lower than in other rich countries. When women have their first
child, 70% of them stop working for a decade or more, compared with just
30% in America. Quite a lot of those 70% are gone for good.
Beyond the Festival of the Dolls
Mr
Abe says he wants to change that. In April 2013 he announced that
allowing women to “shine” in the economy was the most important part of
his “Abenomics” growth strategy. Raising female labour participation to
the level of men’s could add 8m people to Japan’s shrinking workforce,
potentially increasing GDP by as much as 15%, according to Goldman
Sachs, an investment bank. More women working for more pay would also
increase demand. Hence speeches from Mr Abe attaching new-found
importance to matters such as the opening hours of kindergartens and the
challenges of breast-feeding outside the home.
For
the prime minister, who belongs to the conservative Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP), this is quite a turnaround. In 2005, when a previous
government was taking steps towards greater equality, Mr Abe and his
fellow conservatives warned of the damage to family values and to
Japanese culture that could result if men and women were treated
equally. They worried that rituals such as the hina matsuri, or
Festival of Dolls, an annual celebration of young girls and the state of
matrimony, could be endangered. Their concern was not just based on
tradition; keeping women out of the workforce, conservatives thought,
made economic sense too. If the country’s “baby-making machines”, as a
former LDP health minister put it, stayed at home then they would
produce more babies, and thus more workers.
This
insight proved to be flawed. As the LDP encouraged women to stay at
home, the fertility rate, already low, plunged further, bottoming out at
1.26 children per woman in 2005 before edging up to 1.41 in 2012. The
consequent dearth of young people means that Japan’s working-age
population is expected to fall by 40% by 2050, exerting a powerful drag
on the economy. As a solution to this, the direct measure of getting
more women out into the workforce would have great advantages over the
indirect tactic of encouraging them to stay at home in the unfounded
hope that they will breed instead.
Indeed,
it may even turn out that working and having children go hand in hand.
In other rich countries, higher birth rates nearly always accompany
higher female employment, and in Japan itself the birth rate is higher
in the countryside, where more women work, than in the big cities, where
fewer do. The changes that might encourage more urban women into
work—such as better child-care provision, and a less demanding corporate
culture, which would mean shorter working hours for men and women
alike—might encourage them and their husbands to have more children,
too.
The missing salarywoman
Mr
Abe’s interest in all this is new; the problem is not. Yoko Kamikawa,
an LDP politician, recently served on the party’s new committee seeking
to improve the lot of women. In the 2000s, during Mr Abe’s first term as
prime minister, she was his minister of gender equality. She is
startled, she says, by the lack of progress since then.
In
most countries women’s participation in the labour force dips around
the years when they marry and bear children; after that it recovers. But
this M-shaped curve is much more pronounced in Japan than in most other
rich countries (see chart 1). Japan’s curve has levelled out somewhat
in recent years: in 2004 the rate of full- and part-time employment for
30- to 34-year-old women was 61%, a figure which by 2012 had risen to
69%. Yet young, married mothers are still largely absent from the
workforce, and many women returning to work go into part-time or
temporary jobs with low pay and little security.
Those
who stay in work often do so in jobs that waste their abilities. Few
women hold professional, technical or managerial roles. In 2012 they
made up 77% of Japan’s part-time and temporary workforce. Many of these
workers are well-off married women seeking a little extra income. But
others are poor and marginalised. The precarious existence of such
workers was described in “Out”, a bestselling 1997 crime novel by Natsuo
Kirino which had a resonance, and earned acclaim, beyond the borders of
the genre. The heroine, who spends her nights toiling in a soulless
packed-lunch factory, helps conceal the murder of a colleague’s no-good
husband. Ms Kirino’s subsequent bestsellers have also focused on the
division of gender roles, describing men slaving away in the corporate
world, disconnected from women in the home.
At
the very top of corporate Japan, the “bamboo ceiling”—so-called by
women for being thick, hard and not even transparent—is starting to let
in some chinks of light, but they are few and far between. In 2011, 4.5%
of company division heads were female, up from 1.2% in 1989. But
relative to other countries the numbers are still dismal. Of the most
senior, executive-committee-level managers in Japan, 1% were women in
2011, according to a regional study by McKinsey. The equivalent figure
for China was 9%, for Singapore 15%.
Corporate
culture is by far the biggest obstacle for Japanese women. The practice
of hiring graduates fresh out of university and employing them for
their entire working lives makes it difficult for employees to take
career breaks and seek new positions elsewhere afterwards. Promotion
tends to be based on tenure and overtime, rather than on productivity
and performance. And straightforward discrimination remains rampant. In a
study that compared the reasons why Japanese and American college
graduates leave their jobs, American women cited child care and looking
after elderly relations as the main factors. Japanese women blamed
dissatisfaction with their jobs and a feeling of being put into
“dead-end” roles. The fact that their husbands, who spend more time at
work than their counterparts in other developed countries, spend less
time on child care or household chores, adds to the perceived need to
stay at home (see chart 2).
When
Japanese firms take their pick of university graduates they choose men
and women, but they still prefer men for management, sticking most of
the women on the “clerical” track. Foreign companies have been able to
take advantage of this prejudice by hiring and promoting able female
graduates, says Georges Desvaux, the head of McKinsey’s Tokyo office,
who also leads the firm’s global research on the role of women in
companies. Overseas executives inside large Japanese companies tell
tales of über-secretaries with the talent to run the whole business.
Keidanren,
Japan’s most powerful business lobby, has been markedly uninterested in
doing much about this. Though government pressure recently got the
lobby to start internal discussions on promoting women, corporate
leaders regard Mr Abe’s new enthusiasm for improving the lot of women in
the same way as they look on reforms to corporate governance: as costly
distractions from the task of lifting Japan Inc’s profits. Keidanren
refuses to ask its members even to state the number of women on their
boards, in fear of being asked to increase it, or having quotas imposed.
Bureaucrats seeking to find the number scan documents for the suffix
“ko”, usually found on female names.
Male
dominance extends beyond the corporate world: in politics, too, women
are grossly under-represented. In the lower house of the Diet, women
hold only 8% of seats, with 19% in the upper house. In a global survey
of women in parliaments, Japan ranked 123rd out of 189 countries. The
older generation of men is particularly traditionalist, and still wields
the most clout.
Pampered wife, wise choice
Yet
women are not simply being held back by the patriarchy. When the choice
is between leisurely dependency in the home—known as sanshoku hirune tsuki
(“three meals and a nap”)—and the sorry life of a salaryman there is
something to be said for putting your feet up. In wealthy places like
Tokyo many women simply do not wish to work, says Takeshi Niinami, chief
executive of Lawson, a chain of convenience stores.
Mariko
Bando, author of “The Dignity of a Woman”, a bestselling guide for
women on how to succeed in the workplace, points out that many Japanese
women do not feel they need a high-status job to enjoy high status. A
well-educated woman working part-time in a supermarket will not see that
job as defining her identity if she is the wife of, say, a high-ranking
Mitsubishi Corporation executive.
Remarkably,
women seem to have become more conservative about work in the past few
years. In 1979, 70% of women agreed with the statement that “The husband
should be the breadwinner and the wife should take care of the home”.
By 2004 that had fallen to 41%. But in 2012, perhaps because of the
recession in 2007-09, just over half said they preferred to stay at
home. A survey last year showed that a third of very young women want to
become full-time housewives. Potential husbands, meanwhile, were less
traditionalist: only one in five young men said he wanted his future
wife to stay in the home.
Feminism
has remained a timid force in Japan. The long economic boom that began
in the 1950s was a national priority which left little room for
questioning traditional roles in the home or workplace, says Chizuko
Ueno, Japan’s best-known feminist. And women are not without power
behind the scenes. Housewives control the family finances, and in the
workplace so-called “office ladies” wield a lot of influence over the
lives of salarymen, quietly hindering the careers of those they dislike.
There
are, however, some indications that the role of women could change. For
one thing, the boom that overrode all other interests is long gone.
Stagnating wages mean the three-meals-and-a-nap way of life is less
widely available, with households increasingly in need of two incomes.
And the divorce rate is rising. More Japanese women are opting out of
marriages to overworked and largely absent salarymen, and so thus
increasingly need to fend for themselves. Although a portion of young
women want old-fashioned gender roles, the rest, including the “parasite
singles” who prefer living with their parents to marriage, want change.
Herbivore men, carnivore women
Some
of the most motivated graduates nowadays are female, and a growing
number of companies are waking up to the possibility of putting them to
better use than in the past. According to Sakie Fukushima, a director of
another business lobby, Keizai Doyukai, human-resources executives say
in private that they would hire young women ahead of men most of the
time. Yet they are afraid that they will lose them when they have
children. Japan’s female 20-somethings now tend to be far more
internationally minded than their male equivalents, says Lawson’s Mr
Niinami. They outperform soshoku danshi, or “herbivore” men,
so-called for taking low-responsibility jobs and preferring shopping to
sex. These same young men have little desire to follow the
breadwinner/housewife model adopted by their parents. Indeed, Japanese
media have recently, with some surprise, begun to note a trend towards
young fathers taking on more child care.
In
some corners of corporate Japan, firms are changing the old working
practices. At DeNA, an internet-services company, employees have noticed
that their colleagues in California never stay late at the office,
instead continuing their work at home. They are now starting to follow
the American example, says the company’s founder, Tomoko Namba. A few
firms are trying to increase productivity while shortening hours.
Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, a leading blue-chip, is discouraging
workers from staying in the office after seven o’clock.
By
2020 Mr Abe wants women to occupy 30% of all “leadership”
positions—which would include members of parliament, heads of local
government and corporate executives. His most practical step has been to
try to shorten waiting lists for child care by allowing more private
companies into a previously state-dominated sector. Here he has seized
upon the work of Fumiko Hayashi, the mayor of Yokohama, who after being
elected in 2009 managed to reduce the city’s child-care waiting list,
then the longest in the country, to zero in just over three years. A
former senior saleswoman at Honda, BMW and Nissan, she brought private
firms into the sector. Mr Abe wants to expand her “Yokohama method”
across the country.
Yet
many Japanese women, who are particularly protective of their children,
distrust day care (one reason women in the countryside have more
children is that they are more likely to have parents nearby to lend a
hand). What is required, more people now argue, is an army of foreign
nannies. In January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Abe
suggested Japan’s immigration rules could be eased so that foreign
workers could help care for children and elderly relatives, another duty
that falls most heavily on women. There have been unconfirmed media
reports that the government is considering allowing in as many as
200,000 foreigners a year to work in areas such as construction, child
care and nursing.
As
with much of the country’s ambitious programme of structural reform,
however, such a loosening will face high political hurdles. Immigration
is unpopular with the Japanese public; insiders note that Mr Abe may say
such things in Switzerland, but has not given public voice to them in
Japan.
Until
overseas talk is followed by domestic action, many will think Mr Abe
lacks the will to push for changes that would greatly improve the life
of working women. His actions so far have not impressed. A request that
firms allow mothers to take three years of maternity leave—compared with
the 18 months they can take now—met with derision from all sides.
Companies said it would cripple them; feminist critics said that it was
part of the old agenda to keep women in the home. The target of 30%
women in leadership roles by 2020 was first proposed in 2003 by
then-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi. “The target is an old one, and it
was not implemented,” says Yuriko Koike, head of public relations for
the LDP and a former defence minister. The deadline arrives in only six
years; there is little chance it will be met. The idea of reducing
waiting lists for child care, too, dates back to Mr Koizumi’s time in
office.
Some
of Mr Abe’s allies frequently remind voters of the prime minister’s
former traditional views on the family. In January Michiko Hasegawa,
whom Mr Abe had approved as a board member at NHK, Japan’s national
broadcaster, published a column saying that women’s most important task
was to bring up their children, and that this should take priority over
working outside the home. “The message on women is somewhat mixed,”
concludes Ms Koike.
If
the government really wants to increase female employment, argues Kathy
Matsui of Goldman Sachs, it could do so by axing tax rules that keep
women’s earnings low. The “head of household”, normally a man, is
allowed to claim a tax deduction of ¥380,000 ($3,700) as long as his
spouse’s income does not exceed ¥1.03m. The pension system, too,
encourages limited earnings. As long as a wife’s annual wages remain
under ¥1.3m she can claim the national pension without paying any
premiums. Tackling such privileges, however, could cost the LDP the
votes of millions of housewives and their husbands.
At
a private dinner in Davos Mr Abe listened to a small group of senior
women, including a former head of state, discuss what Japan should do
differently. An awkward moment came when one of the guests, Miki
Tsusaka, a partner at the Boston Consulting Group, told him she had
dreaded returning to Japan after a successful career spent mostly in New
York. Yet increasingly, behind their soft tones and feminine demeanour,
many Japanese women are getting ready to break out of their dolls’
house. If the country’s policymakers can find the right ways to help
them, those women could boost the economy and reform corporate culture.
Both they and their sararimen stand greatly to benefit.
