Source: 21 Blue Jaggers Blog
Women’s working conditions are worsening for working women of the part-time variety, according to panelists at a recent Tokyo forum. The low wages for women mean that a single mom would have to work 3600 hours a year at 900 yen per hour (the going rate) to squeak by with two school-age children.
In the last ten years or so, the number of people earning less than 2 million yen per year has increased from nearly 8 million to well over 10 million. Of those workers, seventy percent are women and thirty percent of those women earn less than 2 million yen.
While this may seem appalling to westernized women and men, in Japan this has been and probably always will be the norm. Nix the idea that corporations and government officials will ever change their bias ways in a meaningful fashion, even as the population decreases and the number of elderly needing support increases.
The panelist concluded that J(Just)O(Over)B(Broke) training is the answer, but that is totally wishful thinking. While Japanese women may work on the cheap, India’s and Vietnam’s masses command even cheaper wages to Japanese corporate interests.
The plight of Japanese women is as much the fault of women as it is men. Women often choose home-body marriages when and if their husbands can afford to carry the financial load. The men still expect or subtly pressure women to quit when their motherly duties conflict with their workload, and a large majority of women still eventually relent.
Moreover, I have taught close to a thousand Japanese women English in my 31 years here, and all but maybe a dozen have zero curiosity about careers or entrepreneurship.
The time is ripe to teach all women self-sufficiency, not just single moms. There are scattered NGOs and other support groups in Japan doing just that, but mindsets of both gender are rigid still.
A series of regional high school after-school programs for women desiring to live independently and become entrepreneurial-minded would be a winner.
Once women graduate from high school, the education system and society as a whole sets low expectation for the fair sex, so at adult age they are locked into stereotypical roles. With few exceptions, they will seek out an up-and-coming hubby rather than the grind to success.
They must develop the self-confidence in their formative years. Many prep schools (jukus) face a rapidly-declining youth market. Many of them would be all ears about women entrepreneurial programs.
A good reference point for the aspiring women entrepreneurs can be found in the video below:
Female Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change in Japan from CAPI on Vimeo.
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