+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Social Science Japan No.4, August 1995
Copyright Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo
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Gender Inequality in the Japanese Workplace

AIBA Keiko

The significance of Osawa Mari's book Beyond the Corporation-Centered Society lies in its analysis of how Japanese companies maintain gender inequality in paid work through occupational gender segregation.(1)

In most OECD countries there is noticeable gender differentiation by industrial sector and occupational category. However, in Japan women and men are differentiated by employment status and size of firm. Women are more likely than men to work as part-time workers in smaller firms. Women also change their employment status and type of workplace as they grow older. In other words, unmarried women tend to work as full-time workers in larger firms, while married and middle-aged women tend to work as part-time workers in smaller firms. Osawa challenges the received view that these segregated occupational structures result from women's choices. Instead she attributes them to Japanese firms' need to maintain the nenko system of life-long employment and seniority-based wages for their male employees.

Osawa's work, however, needs to be further developed. First, do we assume that men and women with the same employment status in the same company are equally rewarded, both internally (with opportunities for developing skills and for promotion) and externally (with wages and fringe benefits)? I suspect that both job content and rewards are very different for men and women with similar status. Second, Osawa does not examine to what extent occupational gender segregation affects the gender gap in pay. It is well known that jobs in Japan are vaguely defined and that wages are less likely to be determined by job content. Therefore gender segregation at the job level may not affect the gender gap in pay. This point has yet to be clarified by empirical studies.

The major difficulty in carrying out such empirical studies is the lack of data.
Compared to the US, Japanese government statistics give wage data for very broad occupational categories, and no information on the skills content of those categories. One solution is to collect data through union organizations.
However, the researcher can not take for granted the cooperation of unions, which are generally organized around companies and give priority to maintaining harmonious relations with management. This attitude was well illustrated by a case in which three unions of Sumitomo Group companies rejected a request by female members to publicize important data proving gender discrimination in promotion by their employers. (The workers subsequently collected the data by themselves and presented them in a Counter-Report to the United Nations in 1992.) Despite these difficulties, it is very important that social scientists shed new light on the structures and consequences of occupational gender segregation in Japan.

FOOTNOTE
1 OSAWA Mari (1993) Kigyou chuushin shakai wo koete: gendai nihon wo jendaa de yomu (Beyond the Corporate-Centered Society: A Gender Analysis of Contemporary Japan). Tokyo: Jiji Tsuushinsha. ISBN 4788793245.

AIBA Keiko is a doctoral candidate at Washington State University. She is currently a Visiting Foreign Researcher at the Institute of Social Science.
Electronic mail to keiko[atx]iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp
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SSJ-FORUM members should also note that AMPO, the Japan-Asia Quarterly Review (Vol 25 No. 4/Vol. 26 No. 1 1995) has a special issue on "The Women's Movement at a Crossroad: Looking Toward Beijing." Several articles centre on feminism in Japan.

AMPO is published by the Pacific Asia Resource Center

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