Nishimura Junko - Motherhood and Work in Contemporary Japan

This book explores the employment of Japanese women born in the 1960s and 1970s who experienced childbirth and raised children in the 1990s and the early 2000s. During this period, the Japanese economy experienced a severe recession. It has affected the firm-specific internal labour market and employment practices, which in turn are thought to have greatly influenced Japanese womens employment. On the other hand, the fertility rate declined and social policies to support womens employment began to be implemented after the 1990s. This book explores how these labour market structure and social policies interact to affect Japanese womens employment. The book first analyses the employment patterns of women born between the 1920s and 1970s and examines how they have varied among different birth cohorts. Then the employment behaviour of women before and after childbirth through the post-child-rearing period, as well as the working career of single mothers, is explored for women born in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on the data analyses, the concluding part of this book discusses how changes in the labour market and womens employment support policies during the 1990s and early 2000s interactively influenced employment behaviour of Japanese women, and some suggestions are put forward for changing womens employment during the child-rearing years.

Junko Nishimura is Professor at Meisei University, Tokyo.

Japanese womens employment has shown a pattern that differs in three distinct ways from the ones observed in industrial societies in other countries: (1) an overall increase in the employment rate of women has not been accompanied by an increase in the employment rate of women with young children; (2) higher educational attainment among women has not contributed to an increase in the employment rate of women with children; and(3) part-time employment is not an attractive way of working for women with young children. These three points are discussed ahead in detail.

First, in many countries, an overall increase in the employment rate of women has been accompanied by an increase in the employment rate of women with young children. In Japan, however, the employment rate of women with young children has remained low even as the overall employment rate of women has increased. According to the Labour Force Survey, the employment rate of women aged 15 to 64 increased from 54.9% in 1987 to59.6% in 1997 and then to 61.9% in 2007. Yet, the employment rate of women in households with children under the age of 3 has remained low, with rates at 27.6% in 1987, 27.8% in 1997 and 33.2% in 2007 (calculated from published tables of the Employment Status Survey by Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan). This anomaly between the employment rates for the two categories of women has rarely been observed in other societies. For example, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2011), which conducted a cross-national study on the employment of women with children, the employment rate of women with children under the age of 16 years is over 80% in Sweden and 70% in Denmark; that of women with children under 2 years old is approximately 70% in both these countries. Hungary and the Czech Republic exhibit a pattern similar to that in Japan, but the phenomenon of low employment of only women with young children is quite uncommon among OECD countries.