During the ‘Women in Japan: Current Roles and Expectations’ webinar organized by KAS Japan on 3 December 2021, the speakers discussed the current situation of women in Japan, including their ‘double burden’ of having to work both outside and inside the home, as well as the need to ‘changing’ their husbands’ mindset on traditional gender roles. It was also pointed out that many of the gender-related problems within the Japanese society, such as the lack of female managers and female Diet members, are due to the gender division of labour, in which men are expected to get a job and work outside the home while women should stay home and do household-related work. As such, it is not rare for working Japanese women to feel guilty for getting a job. This is because they feel that by getting a job, they have renounced their obligation of staying home and doing housework. To further prove this point, even today, female politicians are often asked, ‘Who is taking care of your children while you’re out here working?’

In recent years, it has gradually become more commonplace for women to get a job, but this has, in turn, created a ‘new’ gender division of labour where ‘men work, while women both work and take care of the house’. Japan has one of the most generous paternity leave systems in the world and although the rate of men taking paternity leave has been increasing in recent years, it is still not common to see men taking paternity leave. In addition, there exists this idea that ‘men should be the one earning money’, and because of that, men tend to feel more pressure in general (also known as ‘breadwinner bias’). This is said to greatly relate to the high suicide rate among working-age men in Japan.

For these reasons, KAS Japan has chosen ‘society’ as the topic of focus for our next ‘Women in Japan’ webinar series from among the three pillars of politics, business, and society that were addressed in our first webinar. Through the upcoming webinar, we hope to understand the root causes of gender issues in Japan.

The purpose of this webinar is to learn best practices from countries that have been successful in their gender policy on the societal front. For this webinar, we focus on Scandinavian countries to learn how they have achieved their current gender situation by comparing it with the present state in Japan. Through the webinar, we will make policy recommendations to foster change in the gender situation in Japanese society.