A CULTURE OF HARASSMENT
Japan grapples to change workplaces that can be incredibly hostile to women
In a small coffee shop on the edge of Japan’s capital city, Sayaka Osakabe recounts the nightmare of maternal harassment she suffered for two years at the hands of a former employer.
Maternal harassment — pressuring pregnant women to quit or leave the workforce — is one of many forms of harassment that Japanese women face in an overly male-dominated work culture. After becoming ill following a miscarriage, Osakabe requested help with her workload. Her boss dismissed the request and told her to “just get on with it.”
Six months later, Osakabe became pregnant again and followed her doctor’s orders to take a week off to rest at home, hoping to avoid another miscarriage. But her boss immediately paid her a visit at home and spent four hours convincing Osakabe to return to work early. She did and subsequently suffered a second miscarriage.
Even though corporate Japan needs women more than ever amid a shrinking labour force, Osakabe’s story highlights that workplace culture remains incredibly hostile toward women in many situations.
“I think it’s going to take a lifetime to change that,” Osakabe said, a women’s rights activist and founder of Matahara Net, a group that offers support to those who have experienced maternal harassment at work. Osakabe’s harassment continued even after she returned to work following her second miscarriage. One of the first things her boss asked was whether she was having sex again.
Fed up, she went to a labour board in 2014 and won a harassment settlement. Her case coincided with another high-profile maternity harassment case that year involving a female worker who accused her employer of demoting her after learning she was pregnant. That case was heard in Japan’s Supreme Court, which ruled in the worker’s favour in October 2014.
Both cases gained a lot of media exposure, but it took more than a year afterward for a law against maternity harassment to finally be passed.
“It was not acknowledged in Japan until January of this year,” Osakabe said.
Japan needs to do more than that if it is to properly address the massive labour shortage crippling the country’s economy.
The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has worked to bring millions more women into Japan’s workforce. It was one of the main talking points touted as part of his Abenomics reform package.
Some progress has been made, but the scope of the change required is forcing Japan to change its labour laws, as well as its very culture. About 60 per cent of women quit the workforce when they have their first child, many because they are pressured to do so. Only 43 per cent of those who leave end up coming back. Fathers taking paternity leave is almost non-existent.
The women who do return are very unlikely to have the same position or seniority they had when they left. Many find themselves as temporary or part-time workers, and not often by choice.
Keiko Takegawa, deputy director general for gender equality in Japan’s cabinet office, said women who want to work but can’t find jobs represent a massive force of untapped economic potential.
“More than three million women are wishing to work, but aren’t,” she said.
Japan could use them. Goldman Sachs said in a 2014 report that if Japan can close the female labour force participation gap with men, its gross domestic product would rise as much as 13 per cent. The International Monetary Fund said if Japan merely brings its labour force gap to a level equal to the other G7 countries, GDP per capita would be four per cent higher.
Ryuichi Kaneko, deputy director general at the National Institute of Population and Social Security, demonstrates the gap at his office in Tokyo by pulling out a graph of a population pyramid showing Japan’s labour force.
On the male side, participation is high: It gradually grows from 18 and peaks during middle age, before declining until retirement. It forms a neat hump.
The female side shows what Kaneko calls a typical m-shaped graph: the number of women in the workforce spikes from about 18 to their late 20s, when it declines (the average Japanese woman marries at 29), and then increases again in the 40s, before dropping toward retirement.
“Canada’s labour force used to have this trend as well,” he said. “It is still a very famous phenomenon in Japan and South Korea, however.”
At Japan Women’s University, Machiko Osawa, director of the Research Institute for Women and Careers, believes that a monumental shift is occurring for women in the workforce, one she compares to the Quiet Revolution in the U.S. in the 1970s, which similarly saw the labour force gap close in that country as women pushed to change America’s male-dominated corporate culture. But Osawa said Japan’s revolution is a little different.
What is forcing change is the country’s moribund economy and labour shortage, which means more women are now needed in the workforce whether the old boys’ corporate culture wants it or not.