From a Viewpoint of Women Workers

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss where woman utilization should be placed in each corporation from the point of view of the relationship between the equality policy and family-friendly policy.

The degree of gender equality in all areas, except for employment, increased during 1991-1998, according to a survey of the Ministry of Labour in Japan. Only employment has been on the decrease. The degree of gender equality in recruitment decreased until fiscal 1995, but has turned around since fiscal 1998. When this was examined from the point of view of the size and type of businesses, it demonstrated approximately the same tendency.

Nevertheless, the number of women who continue to work after giving birth is not increasing. According to the preceding research, the percentage of these women has stayed at about twenty percent for a long time, and it has not been on the increase.

This fact can be explained with relation to the figures of equality policy and family-friendly policy. Having gender equality level on the horizontal axis, and family-friendly policy level on the vertical axis, a certain point of reference at the coordinate axes takes the direction, in the long run, to head to quadrant I, where the two levels are high, from quadrant III, where both levels are low. In terms of the stage of Japanese corporations, it may be interpreted as that it has not reached quadrant I (which means family-friendly companies), even though a change from quadrant III to quadrant II has occurred.

The bottleneck in the family-friendly policy fullness is due mostly to the fact that child-care leave users do not increase so much. The child-care leave program has not resulted in a situation where anyone can use it without any trouble. According to the investigations in 2000, only 20.7% of the corporations considered that "there is no problem" merely as to the child/elderly care leave program. They often specified the following as problems: "it is difficult to ensure a replacement worker" (50.6%), and "how to treat the substitute after the leave user returns" (41.0%). These two factors are the overwhelming answers. The main cause hindering the employees from taking the child-care leave is the personnel-substituting problem.

The workplace is utilizing two ways of dealing with the situation as countermeasures to this substituting problem. One of these methods is to divide the workload among the co-workers in the division, which may be called "the Share method." This case can be seen in the workplace where there are a lot of employees who work about equally on the same assignment. Another method is that in which the vacancy of the leave taker is filled by people of lower-rank positions in a manner of a pileup or falling dominos. This may be called "the Domino (or Jun-okuri) method." In order for the Domino method to function properly, it is necessary for the company to establish a career path in their ordinary routine. The career path means to clarify what kind of work one will take after one's current work.