世論 What Japan Thinks

When this report popped up on japan.internet.com’s web site, I first thought they’d made a mistake and reprinted a survey from last week, but after a double-check I realised that it was actually a rather clever and appropriate follow-on survey to that recent look at how working women viewed their lot in the office, this time JR Tokai Express Research Inc looking at how males perceived male-female disparity in the office.

Demographics

On the 17th of August 2007 331 men from the JR Tokai Express Research monitor group who worked in private industry took part in a private internet-based questionnaire. 100.0% were male, of course, 9.1% were in their twenties, 38.4% in their thirties, 37.8% in their forties, and 14.8% in their fifties.

One thing you might note is that this time those in their thirties and forties form the biggest group, whereas for women more were in their twenties and thirties. This reflects to some extent the reality in Japanese working life that women tend to abandon their careers (I looked before at some of the issues behind this phenomenon)

As noted before, for those studying Japanese, 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.

Research results

Of the original sample, only nine did not have regular employer status (versus ninety-five women in the previous survey – there’s some disparity right off the bat), so they were excluded from the rest of the survey.

Q1: At your place of work, do you feel there is male-female disparity in the handling of salaries, promotion, etc? (Sample size=322)

Yes, there is disparity (to SQ)	45.7%
No, there isn’t disparity	41.0%
Don’t know	13.4%

That’s 10 percentage points less than when women were asked the same question.

Q1SQ: What sorts of disparity do you feel? (Sample size=147, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Promotion	116	78.9%
Details of work	99	67.3%
Salary	96	65.3%
Other	4	2.7%

Q2: Regarding businesses with and without male-female disparity, which do you think has higher growth potential? (Sample size=322)

Businesses with disparity	3.4%
Businesses without disparity	38.8%
Male-female disparity is not related to business growth	46.3%
Don’t know	11.5%

A whole 22 percentage points less of men think that removing disparity will help business growth. Sadly, this report did not record some of the opinions of men regarding gender disparity in the workplace.