世論 What Japan Thinks

This is one of these surveys reports where there are eyebrow-raising statistics reported and I’d love to get my hands on the fuller results. At my place of work, for instance, I’ve worked with two women who were extremely capable but were very slow to get promoted to the management layer, with one of them, I suspect, held back by being a working mother and working mostly to regulation hours, despite the fact that she was extremely organised and could get everything done as required without needing to stay to 10pm every night in pointless meetings.

So, japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into working women’s attitudes.

Demographics

On the 27th of July 2007 330 women from the JR Tokai Express Research monitor group who worked in private industry took part in a private internet-based questionnaire. 100.0% were female, of course, 24.2% were in their twenties, 48.2% in their thirties, 24.2% in their forties, and 3.3% in their fifties.

For those studying Japanese, note that the word used the the questions below was 格差, kakusa, which translates to disparity rather than perhaps 差別, sabetsu, discrimination. I’m not sure how the different wordings might have affected the responses; for me “disparity” describes the state of the workplace, whereas “discrimination” suggests active policies favouring men, so perhaps it is easier for women to describe their office as having disparity?

Research results

First, from the 330 people in the sample working in private industry, 235 people, or 71.2%, had regular employee status. This group were asked the following question

Q1: At your place of work, do you feel there is male-female disparity in the handling of salaries, promotion, etc? (Sample size=235)

Yes, there is disparity (to SQ)	56.6%
No, there isn’t disparity	33.2%
Don’t know	10.2%

Q1SQ: What sorts of disparity do you feel? (Sample size=133, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Promotion	107	80.5%
Salary	84	63.2%
Details of work	67	50.4%
Other	7	5.3%

Q2: Regarding businesses with and without male-female disparity, which do you think has higher growth potential? (Sample size=235)

Businesses with disparity	2.1%
Businesses without disparity	60.9%
Male-female disparity is not related to business growth	24.7%
Don’t know	12.3%

When those who responded the disparity was better, some of the reasons given were that favouring women was reverse discrimination, and that there were many women who took work lightly and were just waiting to get married and quit. Conversely, women wanted an atmosphere where they could balance work and child-rearing, and companies with disparity did not allow women employees to show their talents.