Equal Employment Opportunity Law Marks its 20th Anniversary
In the days when male dominance permeated every corner of Japanese society, it was women who took up the struggle for reform. It was not until World War II ended in 1945 that Japanese women first got the right to vote. Then in 1985, they finally achieved the enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL). Today, June 1, marks the 20th anniversary of its enactment.
Although the initial draft of the law was drawn up to "prohibit" any gender discrimination in recruiting and hiring, assignments and promotions, and to set up an organization to address workplace discrimination, the actual law enacted only stated that employers should "endeavor" to avoid such discrimination. As a result, it was criticized for its ineffectiveness, since there was nothing that legally required employers to prohibit discrimination. However, the law was revised in 1997 to ban these discriminatory acts.
Despite the fact that the Law made substantial legislative progress in promoting gender equality in employment as compared with the former Law of 1985, it does not provide effective enforcement measures. Local mediation committees are established under the EEOL in order to mediate alleged discrimination cases, but the final settlement requires both parties' consent. Sexual harassment is not even understood as a type of discrimination under the current Japanese law although the EEOL provides that, in consideration of the fact that sexual harassment creates a hostile and offensive work environment, an employer must pay due attention in personnel management to ensure that a woman's reaction to sexual language or conduct in the workplace does not detrimentally affect her terms and conditions of employment or her working environment. Then in 1999, the Fundamental Law for a Gender-equal Society also came into force, laying down the basic ideals of how a gender-equal society should be and dealing more broadly with gender equality issues.
Overall, the social climate has been changing with regard to gender equality, and there are now calls for reconsidering a number of traditional practices and systems, on the grounds that equality cannot be realized simply by safeguarding women's rights without the cooperation of males.
The analogy of the ugly duckling who turns into a swan is sometimes used to describe the improvement of the EEOL over the last twenty years. Unfortunately, however, discrimination against women still persists. Although nowadays women are not simply forced to give up their jobs upon marriage or childbirth, there is much need for improvement in other areas. For example, a substantial proportion of the increased number of part-time workers, temporary workers and other non-regular employees in recent years are women, and the gap between their wages and other working conditions and those of regular employees is considerable. The widely used recruitment strategy based on career and clerical tracks, should also be questioned. Additionally, some negative signs are observable in the low number of female managers and the increasing number of women who prefer to be full-time housewives, rather than participating in the competitive job market.
The reluctance of many women who stay at home to get jobs is mainly attributable to the general picture presented by working life - a discriminative work climate, long hours spent on commuting, and forced overtime. While it is undoubtedly necessary to continue improving the EEOL, the Child-Care Leave Law and other relevant laws, there are two challenges which must be addressed in order to realize gender equality in the workplace: 1) how to change the current workplace environment which is designed to suit men's needs; and 2) how to build flexible systems in the workplace which suit women's needs.
