## gender-equality-in-japan-yamaguchi

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### Overview
- Japan ranked 110 out of 149 in the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Gender Gap Index; comparison ranks: 114 out of 146 in 2017, 111 in 2016, and 101 in 2015.
- The gender wage gap in Japan was 24.5 percent in 2018, the second largest among OECD nations after South Korea.

### Gender wage gap and employment types
- A major contributor to the wage gap is the large share of women in non-regular employment.
  - Just over 53 percent of employed women ages 20 to 65 were non-regular workers in 2014.
  - 14.1 percent of employed men were non-regular workers in 2014.
- Characteristics of employment types:
  - “Regular” workers: employed on indefinite terms without specific job obligations, strongly protected from firings and layoffs; wages increase with age until approximately 50 years old due to wage premiums based on years of service.
  - “Non-regular” workers: fixed-term contracts with specific job obligations; nearly uniformly low wages irrespective of age and gender.
- Quantitative decomposition:
  - Gender differences in employment type explain only 36 percent of the gender wage gap (Yamaguchi 2011).
  - The primary factor is the gender wage gap within full-time regular employment, which accounts for more than half of the overall gender wage gap.

### Management, promotion, and career tracks
- Representation of women in management (2016 Basic Survey on Equality of Employment Opportunity):
  - Women hold 6.4 percent of department director or equivalent positions.
  - Women hold 8.9 percent of section head or equivalent positions.
  - Women hold 14.7 percent of task-unit supervisor or equivalent positions.
- Analysis of firms with 100 or more employees:
  - Only 21 percent of the gender disparity among regular workers in middle management (section heads) and above could be explained by gender differences in education and employment experience.
  - The remainder arose from gender differences in promotion rates among employees with the same education and experience levels.
  - Being male increased the odds of becoming a manager more than tenfold.
  - Being a college graduate increased the odds of becoming a manager 1.65 times.
- Structural causes:
  - Gender-segregated career tracks: managerial career track (sogo shoku) versus clerical dead-end track (ippan shoku); many women avoid sogo shoku because it requires regular overtime hours.
  - Long work hours are a major correlate of becoming a manager for women; women who do not work long overtime hours are deprived of managerial opportunities.

### Work hours, family roles, and cultural factors
- Extended work hours are incompatible with family roles after marriage because of the strong persistence of the traditional division of labor in which childcare and household tasks are chiefly borne by women.
- Japan’s insistence on long work hours is an inherent source of gender inequality, especially for attainment of managerial positions.
- Employers' perceptions cited for paucity of women in higher ranks included:
  - “At the moment, there are no women who have the necessary knowledge, experience, or judgment capability.”
  - “Women retire before attaining managerial positions due to their short years of service.”
- Yamaguchi’s research indicates these employer perceptions are misguided; limited employment duration of women was not a major factor in promotion disparities.

### Occupational segregation and professional categories
- Japan exhibits high gender segregation in professions with two additional features compared with other OECD countries:
  - Even within human services, women are underrepresented in high-status professions (e.g., physicians and college educators)—the proportion of women among physicians and college educators in Japan is the lowest among OECD nations.
  - Women are seriously underrepresented in non-human-service professions (research, engineering, law, accounting).
- Empirical comparison (based on a 2005 Japan survey and the 2010 US Population Census):
  - Type-I professions (high-status human services and all non-human-service professions): 12.7 percent of female employees in the United States are in Type-I professions; fewer than 2 percent of Japanese female employees are in Type-I professions.
  - Type-II professions (human service professions excluding high-status ones): Japanese women are heavily concentrated in Type-II professions.
- Wage implications:
  - Gender wage disparity in Type-I professions is very small, but women are severely underrepresented in Type-I professions.
  - Large gender wage disparities exist within Type-II professions:
    - Average wage for males in Type-II professions is higher than wages of male clerical, sales, or manual workers.
    - Average wage for females in Type-II professions is lower than the average wage for males in the same type of work and lower than the average wage of male clerical, sales, and manual workers.
- Education and occupational segregation:
  - Smaller proportion of women in management and Type-I professions cannot be explained by gender differences in educational background, including college majors (Yamaguchi, forthcoming).
  - Japan and Turkey are the only OECD countries where college graduation rates of women are still lower than those of men.
  - If current gender-specific matching of education and occupation continues as the college graduation rate of women increases, the increase will mostly reflect more women in already female-overrepresented Type-II professions; increase in managerial and Type-I professions will be minimal.
  - Exception: equalization in the proportion of college graduates majoring in science and engineering could increase the share of female scientists and engineers and reduce gender disparity in Type-I professions to some extent.

### Policy recommendations and implications
- Prioritize providing equal occupational opportunity, especially for managerial and high-status professional positions, over focusing solely on equal pay for equal jobs among regular and irregular workers.
- Create conditions for better work-life balance by:
  - Changing the work culture that relies on long work hours.
  - Promoting flexible workplaces.
  - Encouraging a change in the attitude that assumes child-care and home-care responsibilities are only for women.
- Employers should acknowledge that the workplace is not an extension of gender divisions at home but a place for individuals to fulfill their potential and contribute to society.

*Kazuo Yamaguchi, Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2019/march/gender-equality-in-japan-yamaguchi.pdf_