Paper short abstract:

In Japan, those who leave the workforce after giving birth have remained unchanged for a quarter century while a greater part of regular workers takes maternity leave. This paper investigates how academic homogamy leans the female labour participation and governmental forecast of "New capitalism".

Paper long abstract:

From 2013, Abe and the subsequent Government focused on promoting women's labour supply. This is expected to provide a way to tackle labour shortages brought about by Japan's ageing and declining population and lead to high economic growth. Economic policies are being implemented to create a 'society where women shine'.

In 2001, 32.7% of women went on to junior college or university, but by 2022 the rate will be 53.4%, an increase of nearly 20%. In particular, since 2015, the rate of women entering university (including junior colleges) has consistently been higher than that of men. As a result, there can be seen as the fruit of (academic) homogamy (Tachibanaki and Sakoda (2013)).

By 2021 the employment rate of women aged 15-64 had risen to 71.3% and that of women aged 25-44 to 77.7% (White Paper on Gender Equality, 2022 edition). Internationally, the employment rate of women was higher than that of the USA in 2014 (Raymo and Fukuda (2016)) and above average among OECD countries (OECD (2016)), which is not low.

On the contrary, In Japan, the proportion of those who continue to work using the childcare leave system has increased to 53.1%, while the proportion of those who leave the workforce after giving birth has remained unchanged for about 25 years at 33% ('15th Basic Survey on Birth Trends'). Once she exits the labour market with the birth of their first child, and never reenters as a regular worker. (Nagase and Morizumi (2013), Yu (2009)).

The purpose of this study is to consider the issue of continuing to work for highly educated women in terms of academic homogamy while the government occurs economic policies towards the female labour force.