The World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap Report ranks Japan at number one on health indicators for women, but at 114 out of 144 countries on economic participation and opportunity. While Japan’s stagnating economy and declining population have put working women in the spotlight as it seeks to boost its overall workforce and taxpayer base, the ingrained culture of corporate and societal gender discrimination has proved tough to budge.

Tokyo’s first female governor Yuriko Koike made waves at the Tokyo metropolitan assembly election in July and national elections in October on a platform calling for increasing women lawmakers and transparency from the male-dominated Japanese political elite. Koike found traction in the Tokyo elections by speaking to constituents about issues that resonated, such as providing sufficient access to childcare for the city’s families and Tokyoites flocked to her Tomin First No Kai (Tokyoites First) party in huge numbers.

While Koike’s new national political party, the Party of Hope, did not live up to its initial promise, and Koike has resigned as head of the party to focus on her post as governor, the issues that she earlier campaigned on are here to stay.

But is the issue of workplace equality gaining appeal more broadly in Japan? Is the corporate world resilient to changing the stubborn gender norms for women in the Japanese workforce?

There have been advances in policy to support female participation in the workforce over the past 30 years, although concrete achievements are often overshadowed by the problematic political rhetoric. The Equal Employment Opportunities Act (EEOA) of 1985 and its revision of 1997, prohibit discrimination against women in the workplace; and the Childcare Leave Act of 1991 and its amendment in 2010 extended childcare entitlements, including leave today of up to three years and shorter working hours for women. Both were substantial achievements of a kind setting a baseline in Japan for women at work, but they failed to address the problem of workplace culture and norms that entrench established gender roles and limit women’s prospects in the working world. Well motivated though they were the reforms may in fact have served to aggravate the problem.

Ignoring the reality of an inflexible and overtime-reliant workplace, the Equal Employment Opportunities Act failed to change the lot of working women. Corporates responded to the EEOA by creating a two-tiered career system divided into regular (sogo shoku) and clerical (ippan shoku) tracks. Though not explicit, the clerical track was inevitably where women ended up — less than 10 per cent of workers recruited for the regular (managerial track) were women. Once the economic bubble burst the female-dominated clerical track gave way to an even less desirable, less secure, plethora of part-time irregular (hiseishain) jobs.

Kimie Iwata, in our lead essay this week, situates one of the key obstacles to women’s empowerment in the workplace in this two-tiered system of regular and non-regular workers. Though the system is credited with helping Japanese companies through lean times without shedding regular jobs, non-regular workers have limited career opportunities and are paid less, often for the same work. With more than half of working women employed as non-regular employees, the system reinforces women’s second-class role.

Tax breaks for low spousal incomes (which encourages dependent spouse incomes to be kept under 1.03 million yen, or US$9150) have entrenched the two-tiered system over the years, but as Iwata says, it is ‘difficult to achieve women’s empowerment without improving the working conditions of non-regular workers’. Putting equal pay for equal work on the policy agenda, as Abe has done recently, may have some impact on the financial bottom line for women in non-regular employment. But it will do nothing to address the career limitations with which non-regular workers continue to struggle.

The extended childcare entitlements of the Childcare Leave Act, while popular, also do little to challenge the culture of allocating ‘productive roles to men and reproductive roles to women’. Women’s absence from the workplace for prolonged periods of childcare leave embeds their role as the sole childcare providers in Japanese society. As Iwata notes, corporate Japan has begun to realise that these moves may actually stunt, rather than accelerate, women’s career development. But it is yet to address the problem.

Reforms too have been accompanied by unease about conceding new roles for women in Japanese society. For example, then Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa infamously described women as ‘baby-making machines’ in 2007 in a conversation about lifting the birth rate. More recently, the naming of the office responsible for promoting women’s participation in the workplace as the ‘Headquarters for Building a Society where all Women Shine’ sent its own awkward message. Abe’s abandonment of his undertaking to ensure 30 per cent of corporate leadership positions would be held by women is another step back.

Dual income families are no longer the exception in Japan. As Iwata points out ‘for some time, long working hours and uniform, inflexible work-time management have been common in many Japanese companies… [this work-style] is not one suited to working couples, particularly where working mothers are concerned. Work-style reform is essential both to secure the continuation of women’s careers during the childcare period and to improve their chances of career development and promotion’.

Iwata argues that ‘in supporting work–life balance, companies should shift their focus from women to men’. Corporate strategies such as implementing no-overtime days and a limitation on overtime per month will influence the shape of the workplace in the future, but with only 3 per cent of working men taking childcare leave, balancing a working life, childcare and household upkeep remains firmly in the hands of Japanese women. There are those, like Bunkyo-ku mayor Hironobu Narisawa in 2010 who have taken the lead and taken childcare leave. But confronting the workplace culture of harassment of ‘ikumen’ (childcare dads) will be another crucial step towards encouraging men to take up childcare provisions and changing the balance in childcare responsibility.

If corporate Japan is to have a better chance of improving the lives of women (and men) at work, a culture that is reinforced in unhelpful ways by the rhetoric of political and community leaders needs to be reined in. On the policy track, there are glimmers of hope: men can now split family care leave and to an extent share the burden of childcare with women and there are incentives for companies to provide affordable and accessible childcare in the workplace.

Reforming the two-track career system is the next major step in helping women make headway in their re-entry and progress in their careers.

The EAF Editorial Board is comprised of Peter Drysdale, Shiro Armstrong, Ben Ascione, Amy King, Liam Gammon, Jillian Mowbray-Tsutsumi and Ben Hillman, and is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.