You must wait your turn to have a baby

The Mainichi Shimbun (Tokyo)

Women being discouraged from having children? That’s the last thing you’d expect in a country in headlong demographic decline. Yet in workplaces across Japan where women make up most of the staff, that’s just what’s happening, says the Mainichi Shimbun. Japanese women are being told by their managers to wait their “turn” before having a baby. In one recent incident that caused a public outcry, an employee in a childcare centre who discovered she was pregnant was “harshly” chided by the centre’s director for “selfishly breaking the rules”. He had set up a strict schedule for female staff taking time off to give birth and she had broken it. In another incident, a 26-year-old working in a Tokyo cosmetics firm was told by a supervisor she’d only be allowed to have a child in ten years’ time: she was emailed a document mapping out childbirth schedules, with the warning that “selfish behaviour will be subject to punishment”. And even when female staff aren’t explicitly told to stick to a schedule, many put off getting pregnant so as not to “cause trouble to colleagues”. Businesses in most countries can find ways to accommodate pregnant staff. Why can’t Japan learn to do the same?