Study on the Employment of Female College Graduates in an Age of Employment Equality

Abstract

In 1985, upon the ratification of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Japanese government enacted the Law Respecting the Improvement of the Welfare of Women Workers, Including the Guarantee of Equal Opportunity and Treatment Between Men and Women in Employment (the Equal Opportunity Act), and spent the next twenty-five years enacting and revising legislation related to employment equality. As a result, the political impediments to gender equality in employment are slowly but surely being eroded in Japan. Beyond those political impediments, however, social impediments and structural impediments within companies still remain. The elimination of these other impediments is extremely important if we are to achieve a society in which true equal employment can be realized. In contemporary Japanese society, it is possible to see some changes in these social impediments because of changes in the functions of a college education and changes in the family strategies that couples are adopting based on their financial situations. Today, the ability of employees, regardless of gender, to be promoted in the workplace under the system of lifetime employment may be a result of their participation in the rigorous competition for advancement. The walls may still seem thick to college-educated women, but under the leadership of the national government, the penetration of college-educated women into traditionally male-centered companies is genuinely being promoted. Also, the gender wage gap in Japan is still higher than in other advanced nations, but seems to have improved, a little bit at a time, over the past twenty-five years. After the war, while a college education served to help solidify the position of men as contributors to society, many women used their status as a college graduate to help them marry up, or to help them shape or demonstrate their own status. In twenty-first-century Japan, employment equality is protected and supported by law. The remaining impediments to employment equality between college-educated men and women are also likely to be eliminated. Thus, it is very possible that the tendency for college-educated women in Japan to use their education as a means of attaining a certain social status is gradually changing.