Japan still holding back talented women, says Goldman

Bloomberg

Working women are playing a bigger role in Japan than Goldman Sachs’ Kathy Matsui thought possible when she penned her first report on “Womenomics” in 1999. Yet the country needs to pick up the pace of change or risk being overtaken by a demographic crisis.
Two decades ago, Matsui struck an optimistic note amid general gloom over Japan in her first analysis of women in the economy, setting out how empowered women could bolster flagging growth as the population aged.
In a new version, Matsui, now chief Japan strategist, explains how Japanese women continue to trail their peers in other developed countries in many respects, even as they pour into the labour force in ever-increasing numbers. There are now 3 million more women working outside the home than in 2012, yet they earn on average only three quarters as much as men, partly because so many are in part-time roles.
“This country is already on the brink of a demographic crisis,” Matsui said in an interview in Tokyo. “If your sole key resource as a nation is your human capital, you don’t have a lot of options but to leverage every single human being.”
Matsui gives Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a patchy score card in her report — highlighting the slow progress on his pledge to increase women’s representation in leadership, and shortfalls on Abe’s targets for men taking paternity leave and mothers staying in work.

Untapped Potential
Japan, which is set to lose 40 percent of its working-age population by 2055, is already missing out on what could be a 15 percent boost to the economy if women worked to their full potential, according to Matsui. That would entail not only raising the proportion of women in work to match that of men, but having each of them work longer hours.
Matsui notes that Japan’s labour participation rate for women has soared to 71 percent — higher than in the US and Europe, even amid blatant gender discrimination in fields from education to politics.
A Tokyo medical university made headlines last year when it admitted to excluding women in favour of less qualified men. One of the country’s best-known feminists shocked attendees at the elite University of Tokyo’s entrance ceremony, with a blunt speech warning students of the prejudice women would encounter in school and after graduating.
Japanese receive some of the most generous parental leave allowances in the world, yet few men take advantage of them, and women face barriers to returning to work because of childcare shortages. Working mothers suffer because Japan’s fathers do less housework than their counterparts in other developed countries.
Abe, a conservative, jumped on the Womenomics bandwagon after he returned to office in 2012, becoming an unlikely champion of working women as he sought to tackle what he has called the “national crisis” of the aging and shrinking population. He pledged among other things to put women in 30 percent of management positions in all fields by 2020, though progress towards that goal has been glacial.