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257 In 1985, the Japanese government ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and introduced legislation to abolish discrimination against women in all fields. The Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), passed in the area of labor the same year, marked a significant turning point for the Japanese employment system. Since its enactment the EEOL has undergone two major revisions, in 1997 and in 2006, to strengthen the provisions prohibiting discrimination against women. Yet the gender disparity in employment status and wages has not narrowed . Increasing dualism in the labor market or the replacement of regular full-time workers by non-regular workers that has been promoted through deregulation of labor laws has proceeded at a quick pace centered on women ’s labor, causing a rapid increase in low-wage, unstable employment. Even within regular full-time employment, the spread of the dual-track employment management system that was set up after the passage of the EEOL has widened and consolidated the disparities. While the overall relative poverty rate in Japan has risen to 15.7 percent (Koseirodosho 2009)—the fourth highest among the thirty Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries (OECD 2008), it is particularly high for women—especially elderly and single-mother households . Rise in low-paid labor, coupled with lack of adequate social spending on low-income households, has been directly linked to women’s growing impoverishment. Establishment of Equal Opportunity Laws and the Deregulation of Labor Laws Originally, the EEOL required that employers “endeavor” to give equal treatment to women and men. In 1997, a revision sharpened the language so that employers were “forbidden to discriminate against women” both in Mami Nakano Translated by Minata Hara employment and Poverty 18 258 hiring and in type of contracts offered to male and female employees in the same recruitment or employment categories. Details of the regulations were not specified in the law itself, but rather stipulated in the guidelines. Hence, so long as a company could explain that existing gender differences were a function of a “difference in the form of contract,” it was able to evade being charged with discriminatory practices. Furthermore, once the EEOL had become law, many companies set up different tracks for employees based chiefly on three criteria: “job category” or assigning employees either to core decision-making jobs or auxiliary routine work; “transfer eligibility” or assigning an employee to another domestic or international site; and “promotion eligibility” or seeing an employee as a potential manager. In reality, only a small number of women have been let into what continues to be the predominantly male sogoshoku (career track), while the overwhelming majority of women have been relegated to the ippanshoku (“auxiliary work” track) and denied opportunities for promotion, upgrades, or training. These practices have served to further entrench and widen the disparities between women and men. A survey conducted in 2007 of 123 companies that have the dual-track management system revealed that women comprised just 6 percent of those in the career track (Koseirodosho 2008a). The percentage of companies promoting women to managerial positions and the percentage of women among all management-level workers has shown a small increase since the EEOL was enacted. However, the number of corporations that have women in positions of assistant manager or equivalent has actually decreased, and the percentage of companies that have female managers/department heads or their equivalent was only 7.1 percent in 1995, and 8.8 percent in 2006. The proportion of women among managers/department headsremainslowat just 2percent,while even among assistant managers they make up fewer than 7 percent (Koseirodosho 2007). At the same time, with the enactment of the EEOL, work hour restrictions for women were eased or abolished in Japan. Since the working hours for males were far longer than prescribed in international labor standards, bringing them to the women’s level would have resulted in gender equality. Deregulation advocates, however, purposely set the criterion at “maximum work hours” and eased or abolished work hour restrictions for females, which had barely complied with international levels, by deeming the restriction on women “sexist.” This decision compelled women employed full time to work the same long hours as men if they were to achieve parity. On the other hand, married women who desired “work-life balance” had to give up full-time jobs and retire temporarily from the labor force upon marriage, pregnancy, or childbirth, encouraged to return to the labor force only...

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