Earl Kinmonth wrote:

"Further, the fact that a large number of women in Japan are employed on short(er) hour, term contracts is not necessarily a sign of discrimination. It may be what the women prefer. One of the many failings of contemporary writing, especially foreign writing, on this subject is that the writers make their assertions without asking ordinary women what they want ."

RK reply:

You seem to imply that this is voluntary without offering any polls as evidence.

Beyond that, there is a simple test for your proposition that doesn't even need polling. Basically, it's an issue of supply and demand. There are two
possibilities:

1) The share of female non-managerial employees having irregular jobs virtually doubled from 29% in 1984 to 57% by the end of 2013 because this was what women preferred, as you hypothesized.
2) It's because that's the kind of jobs employers were willing to provide.

If option 1 were the case, that would mean that employer demand for full-time women workers was greater than what women were willing to supply. In that case, the price would go up as it always does when demand exceeds supply. In short, real wages would rise.

If it's option 2, that would mean employer demand for full-time women workers was less than what women were willing to provide. In that case, the wage would go down.

The evidence is clear. Real wages have been going down for years.

The same, by the way, is true of men, where the share of irregular employees rose from 8% in 1984 to 22% by the end of 2013.

Richard Katz
The Oriental Economist