Paper short abstract:

In-depth interviews with working married men found that people are more open to assume new roles than to give up traditional roles. The paper argues that promoting women to join the workforce as in Abe's "womanomics" overlooks the real hindrance to the breakdown of the gendered division of labor.

Paper long abstract:

Prime Minister Abe vowed to make Japan a society where "women shine" and declared commitment to increasing the share of women in leadership positions to 30 percent. He exhorted women to join the workforce, however, without adequately considering how people live, how they want to live, and how or if this could change. This paper focuses on Japanese people's perception of gender roles: how do people want to live. Based on interviews to male respondents whose wives have worked fulltime continuously since graduation, I found three behavioral patterns among the men: not sharing childcare with their wives and not making adjustments to how they work; sharing childcare but not making adjustments in work; and sharing childcare and making such adjustments.

In order to understand the variation in people's values and preferences that are not readily apparent in their behavior, I decomposed people's beliefs on gender roles into those concerning traditional gender roles and those concerning non-traditional gender roles. I found that people tend to be more tolerant of assuming new roles than of giving up old ones. In addition, there is a force beyond general beliefs about gender roles that pushes men to work. This force, which I call the "work norm," does not interfere with women's employment or men's childcare.

Promoting women's labor force participation as it is pursued in Abe's "womanomics," while important, overlooks the real hindrance to the breakdown of the gendered division of labor in Japan. Japanese people act according to the stereotypical gender roles more out of inability to let go of their traditional roles than out of reluctance to assume new roles. I argue that attempts by Abe's "womanomics" to intervene in people's private lives are flawed, because, in order to bring about change in the gendered division of labor in the society, they must address the issue of how to emancipate people from their traditional roles: men from the work norm and women from the mothering norm.

Paper short abstract:

We present the work situation in selected OECD countries for female workers. Although European countries, the United States and Japan are different in many aspects influenced by distinctive systems of each nation, various forms of gender disparities can still be detected in all countries.

Paper long abstract:

The productive-age population reached its peak in Japan in 1995, when it stood at 87.25 million. Since then, the productive-age population has been continuously decreasing, impacting the labor supply. By 2014, the population had decreased to 77.85 million, which resulted in a shortage in the labor force. Due to this shortage, Japan is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain its economic growth. Women, elderly people, and possibly immigrants or foreigners are expected to contribute to labor supply.

One of the factors which characterizes the Japanese labor market is considered to be the type of skills of workers. Skills can be classified into two main types, general skills and specific skills. After the 1960s, the notion of specific skills embodied in employees via on-the-job training had been widely accepted and offered the theoretical foundation of long-term employment and the seniority wage system now prevailing in Japan. The logic was that firms had not been willing to provide on-the-job or in-house specific training to part-time workers at firms' expense. Many companies expected a large number of female employees to leave jobs after childbirth. The fact that many women had not considered their jobs as life-long position until official retirement age gave employers a rationale to justify unequal treatments for women such as firms not offering on-the-job specific training as for full-time male employees. Ever since, Japanese society has tolerated a variety of gender disparities.

However, a growing number of women are working nowadays even after getting married. According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's White Paper (2015), the number of double income families has constantly been growing, at least from 1980, and it exceeded the number of single income families for the first time in 1992. More than half the couples are double income couples currently.

We present the work situation in selected OECD countries for female workers. Although European countries, the United States and Japan are quite different in many aspects influenced by distinctive social systems of each nation, various forms of gender disparities can still be detected in all countries.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses a new and distinct recruitment trend – the hiring of foreign fresh university graduates into Japanese multinational enterprises’ operations in Japan. Based on this, we propose a new conceptual framework to assess the viability of international personnel development methods.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses a new and, by international comparison, distinct recruitment trend – the systematic hiring of foreign fresh university graduates (FFGs) into Japanese multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) operations in Japan. Our explorative research, which is based on interviews with HR managers and FFGs, offers three major findings related to international HR development methods. Firstly, the inpatriate literature has identified the roles of foreign (subsidiary) staff as knowledge conduits and boundary-spanners between headquarters and subsidiaries. While such objectives do not drive Japan’s FFG hiring trend, we find similar challenges in terms of the absorptive capacities of headquarters. Secondly, following a Varieties-of-Capitalism perspective, we argue that FFG hiring is an institutional answer to the particularities of Japan’s employment system. Aiming at internationalizing headquarters from within, it contributes to resolving the internationalization conundrum of Japanese MNEs, but rather than overcoming the existing ethnocentric HR model it accommodates this orientation. Thirdly, we advance the general HR literature by proposing a new framework that addresses the viability of international personnel development methods in dependence of the workforce diversity and distinctiveness of employment practices in headquarters. We locate FFG hiring, inpatriation and self-initiated assignments within this framework.