Magazine

Discussion Points: Gender equality in the labour market

You might not be prepared to become a pensioner, but Rina Tsubaki is.

At 23, Tsubaki might be the youngest expert on the social, economic and cultural factors of ageing: After doing collegiate-level research on the topic while doing an internship at the European Journalism Centre, the 23-year-old native of Japan attended the recent EU-Japan Journalist’s Conference in Kyoto.

In addition to reporting on the conference for the EJC Events Section, she took the time to prepare the following discussion excerpts and video:

Naohiro Yashiro, a professor of International Christian University (Japan):
“Most of highly skilled workers, at least in the Japanese labour market, are trained within the firms and need to obey their boss because their jobs are entirely secured. They sometimes have to go to the other side of Japan to work at different branches. ... The point is that there is no intentional discrimination but differences in asymmetric choice between men and women in the Japanese way of work-style. Men stay at the same job but women cannot because of child-raising responsibility. ... The Japanese permanent employment scheme, or seniority system, used to be the source of Japanese companies strength ... but it does not suit to an ageing society where both women and men have to work. That’s why we need a shift from traditional work-style to a new one, but there is a strong resistance both from the labour union and company employers in Japan.”

Philip Bushill-Matthews, a member of the European Parliament (The U.K.)
“The traditions of culture that would be in-build prejudices still can be barriers for full participation of women. ... In my political party from the UK in the European Parliament, there are 27 members but 26 of us are men. Now, that is not because we men are the best and women are not, but it is the built-in perception because we are selected by our female members who are often largely women. ... What we’re challenging to do is to go for positive discrimination. When a MEP from my party is not seeking re-election, then a man has to be replaced by a woman. ... It is to recognize that women have equal skills and to get rid of prejudices that some of our members have.”

Peter Kujath, ARD German Radio (Germany)
“In Germany we also tried to change the gender problems as in Japan, so the policies were introduced to emphasise that men are also taking care of children. But this did not work as it was planned. What is the situation of generally understood gender roles in Japan?”

Kuniko Inoguchi, moderator/ member of the House of Representatives (Japan)
“Every effort is needed. We have to revise textbooks with pictures of mothers doing dishes while fathers reading newspapers. Girls need to be encouraged to dream of becoming a scientist and when she is at high school she shouldn’t be discouraged. It takes the whole village to re-educate yourself and everyone else around you that there is no such thing like fixed gender roles.”

Yukiko Yamazaki, Mainichi Shimbun (Japan)
“I also think that in Japan the problem does not lie at legislative level, but more of the stereotypes on the role of men and women in society. As a journalist, I’ve written a number of articles on possible countermeasures to the falling birthrate, and in the beginning the readers also responded that we need to improve working condition for women and child-care services. But in the end, they start saying that women these days stay working because they want to gain profits for themselves and also they do not have children because they have no idea how important that is for women. It seems to me that people are pre-occupied with the traditional family formation, and not really focusing to change the current policies.”

Ole Ryborg, Ugebrevet Mandag Morgen (Denmark)
“Being from Scandinavia, I sorted out how different it is in terms of equality. In Sweden, for example, you have 18 month of maternity leave paid by the employer, and the present discussion in Sweden as well as in my country Denmark is to change the laws so that one certain amount of maternity leave has to be taken also by the men. Especially in the British Conservative party, the perception is that it is good not to have regulations and everything done by freedom. But the perception we learned in Scandinavia is the opposite. For instance, at some boards of companies, there were almost no women, and men always said we really want to have women on this board but we couldn’t find someone qualified. Starting off from Norway to Sweden and now in Denmark, the perception became if you really can’t find any women qualified, we have to legislate on this. The same goes for politics; the last social democratic government in Sweden decided to have 50-50 ratio of men and women, and they succeeded it! There are lots of qualified women out there, so it’s just a matter whether you want to find them.”

Tomoko Otake, Japan Times (Japan)
“I agree with many of the panellists today that changing legal system and policies are not enough, it’s about peoples’ perception. ... But at the same time what is left out is that there has to be somebody who takes care of children and often the voice of children is left out from the picture. And we need to address both mental and physical well-being of children in the context of declining population. One way of doing that is not to force men to take care of children. ... I saw a documentary about a group of Japanese men who created Papa Kentei, a kind of informal qualification test for being a good dad. One question was about how many skills are available for this traditional Japanese game. The reason for this question to be asked on the test is because many Japanese fathers have trouble finding the topic to talk about, so this exam stimulates fathers to have more communication with kids. This might sound silly but in a long run it may change the perception in the society.”

Lada Kičmerová, Lidové Noviny (The Czech Republic)
“There are still big differences between the countries in the European Union. In the Czech Republic, maternity leave used to be four years for a mother with a child. Within these four years she could be at home with her child and she would have a job guarantee with the company after her maternity leave. Now the government passed the new system which gives the mother a choice; she can either stay with her child two, three, or four years. And if she chooses two years and decides to go back to her work earlier, she gets more money within the two years of maternity leave. What I found interesting is that the statistics show that mothers don’t choose the two years of maternity leave, so they don’t want to take the opportunity that the government just introduced. Another thing is that in the Czech Republic during the communist period women worked and there was a public child care system which was used very commonly. ... Now, after the revolution, kindergartens are being closed and the reason is that there are no interests in this service anymore. This is due to that there are fewer children and the mothers do not take advantages in this public child care service, which again poses the question of asymmetric level that the problem lies in the society.”

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