Mar 08 (Nikkei) - Japan is struggling to bridge its gender pay gap, with women in the country still making 74% as much as the men and remaining a minority in lucrative professions.
Tuesday marks International Women's Day, designed to raise awareness of women's achievements and challenges around the world. Alarmed by the current situation, some companies in Japan have begun taking matters into their own hands to identify and address gender-based disparities.
The average monthly pay for female full-time workers in Japan came to 251,800 yen ($2,190) in 2020, compared with 338,800 yen for their male counterparts.
Japan's Equal Pay Day, which symbolizes how far into the following year women must work to make as much as men did the year before, also reveals a major discrepancy. Women in Japan would have had to work an extra 112 days to match men's pay in 2018, compared with just 17 in Norway.
Many factors contribute to the problem. "There are few women not only in management roles, but also in high-paying and specialized professions like medical doctors and lawyers," said Kazuo Yamaguchi, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago.
Just 21% of Japan's doctors are women -- the lowest percentage of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Meanwhile, kindergarten teachers, nutritionists and others in overwhelmingly female-dominated fields usually earn less per year than the nationwide Japanese average of 4.87 million yen.
And while female participation in Japan's workforce topped 70% in 2018, 54% of working women in 2021 held irregular jobs, compared with 22% of working men.
Source: ANNnewsCH
