With little help from dads, Japan's working moms shoulder big tasks at home

The paperwork never ends for Yoshiko Nishimasa.

There are the meticulous logs she must fill out every day, not to mention the pages of work she carefully checks and approves with a personalized stamp. She even keeps daily records of conversations, activities and meals.

But none of this bookkeeping is for her job as a marketing professional. It’s all for her children’s preschool — before she can even head to the office.

Like so many working mothers in Japan, Ms Nishimasa, 38, is swamped by onerous, bureaucratic tasks that have nothing to do with her profession but constrain her participation in the workforce at a time when the country says it desperately needs more from women like her.

Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has an explicit goal of energizing his nation’s sputtering economy by elevating women in the labour force, an initiative catchily referred to as “womenomics.”

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Mr Abe boasted that 67 per cent of women were working in Japan, an all-time high and “higher than, say, in the United States.”

But many of those women are stuck in limited roles in the workplace, and one of the biggest hindrances to their ambitions — and the nation’s as a whole — is the disproportionate burden women shoulder at home.

It is a legacy of the country’s exacting domestic expectations and rigid gender roles for who performs them. While Japanese women have entered the workforce at historic levels, their avalanche of domestic responsibilities is not shrinking — and men are typically not helping.

In fact, men in Japan do fewer hours of household chores and childcare than in any of the world’s wealthiest nations.

According to an analysis of government data by Noriko O. Tsuya, an economics professor at Keio University in Tokyo, women who work more than 49 hours a week typically do close to 25 hours of housework a week. Their husbands do an average of less than five.

“Compared with what happened in women’s employment,” said Ms Tsuya, “there has been so little change, or a lack thereof, in gender relations at home.”

Consider Ms Nishimasa’s daily routine. The preschool her two youngest children attend requires the family to keep daily journals recording their temperatures and what they eat twice a day, along with descriptions of their moods, sleeping hours and playtime. On top of that, her 8-year-old son’s elementary school and after-school tutoring class require that a parent personally signs off on every homework assignment.

The paperwork, of course, is just the beginning. There is cooking, cleaning and laundry, often at a scale that far exceeds what most Westerners do. Cooking a typical Japanese dinner often involves preparing multiple small dishes. Packed lunches can be works of art. Dishwashers are not yet ubiquitous. And as for laundry, few families own dryers big enough for large loads, so wet clothes are generally hoisted on clotheslines.

She does the vast majority of it all.

Her husband, a management consultant, often stays late at the office or goes out drinking with clients — which are also deeply entrenched expectations in Japan, particularly for men.

But Japan’s economy needs educated women like Ms Nishimasa to work to their full potential. After World War II, as the nation entered a period of rapid economic growth, Japanese women typically quit work when they married or gave birth, taking care of the home while their husbands worked punishingly long hours to power Japan Inc.’s industrial expansion.

In the late 1970s, married women slowly started to enter the workforce. Then, when Japan’s stock and property bubbles popped in the early 1990s, large numbers of them went back to work to keep their families afloat financially.

After that, Japan, once the economic powerhouse of Asia, struggled to lift itself from a protracted period of stagnation. It was overtaken by China as the world’s second-largest economy in 2011, and Mr Abe has staked much of his reputation on returning the economy to steady growth and keeping it from becoming a global afterthought.

Now, with a declining and rapidly ageing population, Japanese employers are struggling with a severe labour shortage. And while the government has expanded some visa categories for foreigners, the country is still opposed to increasing immigration significantly. So Mr Abe has underscored the importance of working women to shore up the economy for the long term.

But more than half of working women are employed part-time, and about a third are on temporary contracts, reinforcing a large pay gap between men and women.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, women in Japan represent fewer than 1 per cent of management positions, compared with an average of 4.6 per cent among the world’s most developed nations.

Kathy Matsui, a Goldman Sachs strategist who wrote influential papers that Mr Abe relied on when formulating his “womenomics” policy, said that raising women’s employment rates to the same level as men’s could increase the country’s economic output by more than 10 per cent.

But the boost to the Japanese economy would be much larger if women could pursue higher-level careers and were appropriately paid, Ms Matsui added.

“How do we make that happen?” she said.

At the moment, Japanese women often face a double-edged sword.

Like many Japanese companies, Ms Nishimasa’s employer accommodates her towering domestic responsibilities. Until her youngest child, now 2, enters second grade, she can work a shortened seven-hour day, albeit for 30 per cent lower pay. She is never asked to do the kind of overtime she regularly put in before her children were born when she was often at the office until 10 p.m. or later.

But because of that, she has not been promoted in eight years and has received scant pay raises.

“When I asked why,” she said, “my boss said my output was lower because I work fewer hours.

@2019NYT