Long Way to Go towards Gender-Equal Society
At a Cabinet meeting held on June 19, the Government approved its Fiscal Year 2007 Annual Report on the State of the Formation of a Gender-Equal Society, which features an international comparison of gender equality. According to the Gender Empowerment Measure, GEM, which gauges gender inequality in terms of political and economic activities and decision-making, Japan is ranked 42nd out of 75 countries.
A comparison of 12 countries in Asia, Europe and North America shows that the proportion of female parliamentary members was highest, 47.3 percent, in Sweden, followed by Norway (37.9 %) and Germany (31.6 %). Japan ranked the second from the bottom, with 9.4 %, next to Malaysia (8.9 %). As for the proportion of female national civil servants in 2005, Japan ranked the lowest of 10 countries for which the relevant data was available, with 20 percent, while the other nine countries had percentages in the range of 34 and 56 percent. It also ranked at the bottom for the proportion of female workers in posts of section manager or higher (1.8 percent), while Singapore ranked at the top with 62 percent.
In particular, the proportion of female workers in managerial posts in Japan is a mere 10.1 percent, putting the country at the bottom of the ranking along with the Republic of Korea (7.8 percent), which is conspicuously low compared to other countries in Asia: the proportion is 57.8 percent in the Philippines and 25.9 percent in Singapore. Japan's labor force rate for women is also low, if slightly, compared to countries in Europe and North America, showing a clear M-shaped curve.
As part of the annual report, a survey on the gender gap in wages was carried out with the recognition that it serves as an index of the status of women. The ratio of wages for women compared to those for men was 66.8 percent in Japan: the gap is as large as in the Republic of Korea and Malaysia, compared to countries in Europe and North America where the figure reached the 80-percent mark in general. The Government attributes this finding to the fact that many female workers give up their jobs when they give birth and raise children, and that many of them, when resuming work, choose part-time jobs whose wages are much lower than those of regular full-time jobs.
The report also reveals that a conspicuously large proportion of both men and women in Japan and the Philippines agree with the idea that husbands should work and wives should take care of the household. Not a few Japanese seem to have the impression that women's participation in society has advanced significantly, but the report, which indicates a lack of gender equality in various areas, demonstrates that there is still more work to be done in realizing a gender-equal society in Japan.
