Understanding gender equality through the lens of childcare policy

Comparing Norway with Japan

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to shed light on the state of gender equality in Norway and Japan through tracing their changing childcare policies. In both countries, women’s rights have been gradually extended even as the role of the mother has been strongly emphasised. Although late to introduce pertinent public childcare services, the socialisation of childcare has nevertheless come to be recognised as important in both. In Norway, this process of recognition took place in the wake of welfare state expansion in the 1960s that led to a labour shortage. In Japan, the low birth rate crisis of the 1990s served as a key starting point. The two cases differ in one important respect: whereas in Norway it became rational, from the standpoint of families and companies who were facing immediate pressures, to urgently create new public nursery services, the occurrence of low birth rates has led to no such immediate pressures in Japan. There, responses to demographic ageing have been prioritised over childcare to the extent that, even now, families are required to wait for an extended period of time to secure nursery places for their young children (known, in Japanese, as the taiki jidou mondai).