Japan’s gender gap
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Bibliographic details
- Authors: KAZUO YAMAGUCHI
- Published: March 1, 2019
Summary findings
- Japan ranked 110 out of 149 in the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Gender Gap Index; previous 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 (surpassed only by South Korea).
- Just over 53 percent of employed women ages 20 to 65 were non-regular workers in 2014, compared with 14.1 percent of employed men in 2014.
- Among regular employees, wages increase with age until approximately 50 years old due to wage premiums based on years of service.
- Gender differences in employment type (four categories distinguishing regular versus non-regular employment and full-time versus part-time work) and age explain only 36 percent of the gender wage gap (Yamaguchi 2011).
- The gender wage gap within full-time regular employment accounts for more than half of the overall gender wage gap.
- Women hold 6.4 percent of positions of department director or equivalent; 8.9 percent of section head or equivalent; and 14.7 percent of task-unit supervisor or equivalent (2016 Basic Survey on Equality of Employment Opportunity).
Causes and mechanisms
- Non-regular employment
- Large share of women in non-regular positions contributes to low wages because non-regular employees have nearly uniformly low wages irrespective of age and gender.
- Employers prefer new graduates for regular employment; women who leave jobs for childrearing and attempt later re-entry face limited opportunities for regular employment.
- Wage gap within regular employment
- More than half of the overall gender wage gap arises within full-time regular employment rather than from overrepresentation of women in non-regular work.
- Male-dominated management and promotion bias
- 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 arises from gender differences in promotion rates among employees with the same education and experience.
- Being male increased the odds of becoming a manager more than tenfold; being a college graduate made it 1.65 times more likely (study controlled for other determinants).
- Gender at birth, rather than individual achievement, strongly influences managerial attainment.
- Career-track segregation and long work hours
- Two-track system: managerial career track (sogo shoku) versus dead-end clerical track (ippan shoku), strongly associated with gender.
- Many women avoid sogo shoku because it requires regular overtime hours; long work hours are a major correlate of becoming a manager for women.
- Extended work hours conflict with traditional family roles where childcare and household tasks are chiefly borne by women, making long hours an inherent source of gender inequality.
- Occupational segregation and professional composition
- Women are overrepresented in human services professions (Type-II professions) and underrepresented in high-status human service professions and non-human-service professions (Type-I professions).
- In the United States, 12.7 percent of female employees are in Type-I professions, compared with fewer than 2 percent of Japanese female employees (based on a 2005 nationwide survey for Japan and the 2010 US Population Census).
- Gender wage disparity in Type-I professions is very small, but women are severely underrepresented there; large gender wage disparities also exist within Type-II professions where female wages are lower than male wages and lower than male clerical, sales, or manual worker wages.
- Educational background, including college majors, does not explain the smaller proportion of women in management and Type-I professions (Yamaguchi, forthcoming).
- Japan and Turkey are the only two OECD countries where college graduation rates of women are still lower than those of men.
- Equalizing college graduation rates alone is unlikely to substantially reduce the gender wage gap unless there is equalization in the proportion of college graduates majoring in science and engineering (which would increase female scientists and engineers and reduce Type-I profession disparity).
Research evidence cited
- Yamaguchi, Kazuo. 2011. “Decomposition of Inequality among Groups through Counterfactual Modeling: An Analysis of the Gender Wage Gap in Japan.” Sociological Methodology 43:223-55.
- Yamaguchi, Kazuo. 2016. “Determinants of the Gender Gap in the Proportion of Managers among White-Collar Regular Workers in Japan.” Japan Labor Review 51:7-31.
- Yamaguchi, Kazuo. Forthcoming. Gender Inequalities in Japanese Workplace and Employment—Theories and Empirical Evidence. Springer.
Policy recommendations
- Prioritize eliminating the gender wage gap among regular workers (including full-time regular employment) as more urgent than solely addressing overrepresentation in non-regular employment.
- Provide equal occupational opportunity, especially for managerial and high-status professional positions, rather than focusing only on equal pay for equal jobs.
- Change work culture that relies on long work hours by promoting flexible workplaces and better work-life balance.
- Encourage a change in social attitudes that assume child-care and home-care responsibilities are only for women.
Source: "Japan’s gender gap" — KAZUO YAMAGUCHI, Finance & Development, March 2019.
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