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View All NewsJapan – Growing female workforce surpasses America
Japanese women now outpace American women in labour force participation; with 64% of working age women in Japan employed compared with 63% of American women, reports astroawani.com.
The Japanese employment rate surged in recent years, while the rate in the US declined and then stagnated. For generations, American women led the developed world in female employment, which begs the question, what happened?
Economists are unsure. The culprit could be a combination of changing attitudes toward mothers at work in Japan and relatively limited support for mothers at work in the US.
In 2013, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that he would prioritise gender equality in the workplace, calling it vital to sustained economic growth. Among his goals was to raise the share of mothers who return to work after the birth of their first child to 55% by the year 2020. He believes that this could boost the country's gross domestic product by 15%.
Mr Abe wrote in a 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed: "Japan is a country with a shrinking population caused by a seemingly intractable decline in its birth rate. But “Womenomics” offers a solution with its core tenet that a country that hires and promotes more women grows economically, and no less important, demographically as well."
Meanwhile, the recovery in the US has been painfully slow, especially for women.
Roughly 8.7 million jobs vanished during the most recent recession. Since the downturn ended, however, men have encountered less difficulty getting back to work, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Between February 2010 and June 2014, men gained 5.5 million jobs, while women gained 3.6 million.
Economist Heidi Hartmann, President of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, blames this on a blend of forces: The United States doesn't offer family-friendly workplace policies, such as paid family leave or sick days, and the gender wage gap hasn't budged much in a decade.
"The question is, why didn't we continue to make upward progress?" Hartmann asked. "That's partly because women don't feel like they get a fair break in the labour market."
One thing Japanese women have that many American workers lack is financial help for new mothers. They receive 58 weeks of maternity leave, 26 of which are paid. Fathers are entitled to the same amount of time off, though less than 2% actually take it.
Mr Abe has also pledged to create 400,000 childcare centres nationwide by 2018. Parents also receive a "child allowance" from the government, implemented and recently doubled to "reduce the economic burden" on families.
Parents in the United States receive no such benefits unless their employers supply it. An estimated 43 million American workers, mostly those at the bottom of the pay scale, report having no access to paid leave. Economists say that's one reason the United States has been trailing other countries in the quest for a work-life balance. A growing body of research shows that mothers, far more than fathers, are forced to scale back at work or quit, even if they need the income.