 Good morning. My name is Bruce Chapman. I'm an economist, a labour economist and education economist from the Crawford School of Public Policy and the Research School of Economics. When I heard the word womenomics, I thought I don't think I'll be able to say this word womanomics and it's not that easy to say. And I thought it would be when Shiro asked me to share this session, it would be about some of the essential preoccupations of labour economics, that is in particular about the pay differences between men and women, about the different treatment of men and women in the labour market, about what is written in the Old Testament for those of you who don't know that is one of two Christian books comprising the Bible and it's said in the Old Testament, and if a man be paid 100 shekels of silver, then it comes to pass that a woman be paid 60 seconds shekels of silver, as if this is some kind of pre-ordained rule from God, some kind of natural order. But it's not, of course. And while womenomics is about this, it is about much more than this. It is about gender roles, particularly gender roles in Japan, about labour market arrangements and the household divisions of labour. Critically it is about demography, Japan's major issue of an ageing population. And it's about government policy related to childcare, parental leave and much more, including immigration. And to take us through this and more, we have three talented and experienced commentators, Kei, Kitazawa, Buku, Nagasi and Omi, they'll be speaking in order. Their buyers are in the programme. I won't introduce them beyond what I've already said except to say welcome so much. That is the order in which we'll go. They're going, I'll have 15 to 20 minutes and then we'll open it all up for discussion. So we'll start with Kei. Thank you. Thank you for the kind introduction, Professor Chapman. Good morning, everyone. I'm very honoured to be a part of these prestigious events in Japan Update 2016. As Professor Chapman clearly mentioned, the womanomics is not about just women's participation in workplace. It is related to more larger issues such as demographics in Japan. So in my presentation, I'd like to give you an background and overview of womanomics so that I can set the context of following two presentations and our discussions later on. Right. So I will start with Japanese demographics. When we look at the population trends in Japan, it reached the peak, 127 million in 2005 right here. And it started to decrease rapidly after that. The government focused that Japan's overall population will shrink by a third over the next 50 years. If it continues shrinking at this current speed, the population of Japan will be roughly the same size as that of Australia by 2100. So not only it is decreasing as a whole, but Japanese population also rapidly aging. By 2050, working age population who is above 15 and younger than 65 barely surpassed the elderly population who are above 65. So this figure, this illustration clearly shows the increase of the elderly's approaching 40% of total population. The workforce will be half in 50 years. So the implication of this trend for the Japanese economy and Japanese position in the world is very obvious. Japanese economy has been suffering from its long deflationary spiral for the last two decades. Pulling ourselves out of this negative spiral needs more workhorse. As His Excellency Ambassador Kusaka mentioned last night in his speech, this is where Japanese government takes several measures including bringing in more foreign workers. At the moment, there are 910,000 foreign workers in Japan, 60,000 new workers arriving each year. And advisor to Prime Minister Abe said last week that the government is planning to pass a new bill for foreign workers this autumn to expand the current foreign training system under which the workers are given entry for a limited period, which is to be extended for current three years to five years. Such policy is expected to double the number of the foreign workers in Japan, but of course immigration alone cannot help Japan's demographic problems. So Abe administration has about to stop the population foreign and population foreign under 100 million by pushing up the birth rate. So I'd like to quickly to look back the past demographic debates in Japan. So in the last century Japan gradually shifted from the society of high birth rate and high mortality rate to that of low birth rate and low mortality rate. During this period we saw a sway in political debates about Japanese population. At the turn of the century with the development of industrialization, continuous flows of domestic workers into large city created a large urban population. Around that time the risk of the shortage of food and other products is the most pressing issue for Japanese policymakers. And thus they often argue that Japan is overpopulated around this time. So in the 1930s and 40s while Japan was engaged in wars, having more children was promoted under the slogan of rich country strong army. But with the end of Second World War, Baby Boom brought Japan another temporary overpopulation with severe competition for the access to housing, higher education, and employment. And that is why family planning and birth control policies were introduced in the late 40s and early 50s. So the image of a standard family with two children, working father and housewife wife, was idealized during this period, Baby Boom period. But since 1970s the trend of decline in the birth slate continues. But it was neglected due to the high economic growth. It was only 1990 that the demographics came high on the political agenda again. Look at the labor market trend. There are two trends in the labor market. Around 2000 the replacement of permanent workers by non-regular workers started to increase. 20% of male workers under 35 is worked on a temporary basis at the moment. And at the same time the average wage continues to decline since 2000. Again the traditional model of standard family with two children, working father and housewife mother that I mentioned earlier was no longer financially stable. Although that model has been the basis of the government labor policies and social welfare system. And this traditional family model is no longer sustainable also from the viewpoint of each household. The number of the double income household has already surpassed that of single income household. In other words the household in which only husband works. You can see this double income household. The number of the double income household surpassed the number of the single income household here. So given these trends in the demographics and labor markets there are two expectations for the Japanese women at the moment. One is continue working and two is have children at least two. So womanomics first started as a theory that espouses the empowerment of women arguing that enabling women to have access to equal participation in an economy and society will result in economic benefits and social progress. That was the original idea but since it goes square with the need of utilization of female labor other administration adopted womanomics as a policy tools and has urged business firms to employ more women and promote them to more senior positions. And Mr. Abbott's plan of building a society in which all hundred million people can be active. That was the name of the plan of administration decided by the cabinet last June tried to take further steps. And in this plan the government explicitly pledged to remove the obstacles for women to pursue their career while not having to giving up having a children and other and giving up other personal goals. So employing more women will not itself solve the problem. Women needs to be assured that even if they have take a time off to have children they will not lose out in the competition for promotion. They need that kind of assurance but it's as is often the case they do suffer from that kind of discrimination at present in most Japanese companies. So womanomics is not just about the child care it's about changing our working style. So what are the obstacles. So what are the obstacles for women to achieve their career goals at workplace. This class shows the results of the survey in which people are asked to ask about how equal men and women are treated at school at the top at home and at work. So interestingly in education you see that approximately 70 percent of the people thinks that men and women are treated equally in education at the university or any other educational space. But once they join the workplace different story and at home with more young Japanese men becoming much more willing to undertake domestic chores in addition to taking care of their youngsters there's a slight improvement in how men and women are treated at home. But looking at work traditional gender role bias largely remains underneath lying the long working hours I think. So not so many Japanese company has so five o'clock and go home that kind of culture. So the Japanese company at Japanese company overtime work has increased actually in these days as firms cut workforces. So about 20 22 percent of Japanese employee work 50 hours or more each week on average were above 11 percent in the US and 6 percent in Spain. And overtime and long working hours are so common that it became one of the top reasons why there are few female managers in Japanese companies. And one survey done by Daiwa shows that shows that the company uses an index in which if whether the employees overtime is 69 hours per week or more as a variation for the promotion. So in the cabinet office survey 40 percent of female employees rejected a promotion on the ground that they don't want to undertake even longer working hours. But we should stop here and think again. It's not just about women but everyone in the society is related to this problem. We all want to be active want to realize our dream not just in terms of career but personal life and in other fields. So in fact one survey shows that more men want to spend less time at work but can't in reality. So for the percentage. So for the man more people spend less time at work but in reality they have to spend quite a lot of time at work. And for the percentage of the people who want to balance who want to balance work and home work and home and all of the activities such as work home community and personal growth. And if you look at the percentage of people who want to balance that kind of activities there will be there will be no difference between man and woman. And that percentage accounts almost half of half of those who take these surveys. So Japanese society as a whole needs sound work life balance. Question for you in the auditorium. And which of the following five measures has the most has the has the best effect on realizing work life balance. The first one is giving employees maternity or paternity leave. The second one is giving the fixed time rules which is basically sliding your working hours and you can set the starting time of your work as you like. And the third one is the option to work from home. The fourth one is switching to a temporary part-time work. And the fifth one is shorter working hours by sharing. Could you raise your hand if you think the first option works best maternity leave. Second option for next time. Third one working from home. Fourth one switch to a temporary part-time work. The fifth one work hours. Thank you. I kind of mistakenly giving away the answer here as you can see. But yeah you're right. The comparative studies that service 23 international companies in the UK, Japan and other European countries illustrates that interestingly amongst these five measures only the only the shorter working hours by work sharing has got has got a proof effective in improving the work quality and improving the motivation and productivity and additional leaves such as maternity leave or paternity leaves only contributes to the motivation while working from home has negative impact on performance and productivity. But there is a catch with work sharing. It will often entail that the decrease in income. So what measures need to be taken here in order to promote work sharing? So I think the keyword here is multiplying or diversifying. People cannot expect an adequate level of income just relying on their job or social security framework. Asset building through a self-reliant efforts has become crucial for individuals to secure a stable life. So there are two policy and initiative proposed by the governments. One is NISA, a Japanese version of the individual saving account. It was introduced in January 2014 to promote individual investment in Japan and its total investment has already reached to 1 trillion yen in 2015. And second initiative is opening up the possibility of side businesses. In 2014 only 3.8 percent of the companies allows its employees to take on any side businesses even in their non-working hours. The same service shows more than half of the employees on the other hand wants to do a side business if allowed. So in early this year, Japanese Meti announces that it will set up a guideline for side businesses. It will call for companies to revise its contract and rules of employment and will modify unemployment insurance system to make temporary workers working on the side businesses with less than 20 working hours eligible for this unemployment insurance system. And on workers side they may want to use more free time to develop their skills. So government and companies should support their effort by providing subsidies and opportunities to resources for relevant training. And financial support for entrepreneurs is also considered within the government. In 2014 Meti plans a new program to promote entrepreneurship and investments into startups. This program aims at pushing the rate of establishment of new company to 10 percent. And as young entrepreneurs start to start businesses by guaranteeing annual income of five million yen. Most importantly it is necessary to reduce the gap between permanent full-time workers and non-permanent part-time workers. There is a wage gap between the two as large as 44 percent including all allowance, bonus insurance and other benefits in the pay package. And also taking account of the wage gap between men and women female part-time workers merely a third of male permanent workers at the moment. So in the last upper house election equal work equal pay was amongst the foresee of the election. So now the government is considering the pay equity act to ensure women and men permanent and non-permanent workers receive equal pay for the performing the jobs that are substantially the same. So if they have if they take on the job with the same responsibility they will receive the same pay. So in addition to the effort made by the governments I just like to quickly introduce and introduce an example of female entrepreneurship in Japan. Wontedly is the name of the company but it's the name of the company is called Wontedly. It is a Tokyo based tech startup established by Mrs. Ms. Ahipo Naka in her 20s four years ago. Wontedly is a social recruiting platform allowing employers to find potential employees by showing the details of job openings and how they would work in the company with possible future colleagues. So Wontedly become profitable in his fourth year with 350,000 registered users 80% of them are engineers and IT professionals in their 20s and 30s. So speaking of the success of her company the CEO Akiko Naka said that they are not providing the normal matching service between job seekers and potential employers. What they do instead is to provide iscribed with opportunity to reach out for the people who like what you do how you work and with what kind of people. So it Wontedly is in a way helps allowing flexible working style that both employees and employers can develop together. So as you can see the job seeking behavior of young professionals are rapidly changing and so does the job themselves. Most of the manufacturing and white color tasks in OECD countries are expected to be replaced by automation or to be changed in its nature by introducing large quantity of information gathered through various sensors connected to the internet and AI and other cognitive computing technology to decipher its patterns. So in 10 years time most our job will not be making things or doing some analysis by ourselves but making plenty of informed decisions and give instruction to the system based on the patterns they found. So management liaison and coordination design and creative tasks and other human human related tasks will be the mainstream of our future job. So jobs will be more fragmented ad hoc and less time consuming. So this trend is worldwide so getting left behind is damaging for our already stagnated economy. So against this backdrop I believe now is the time for Japan to really change its working culture adopting more flexible working style will obtain more precious time to invest in personal life learning new technologies and increase overall productivities. And so coming back to the original question will womanomics work? So again it's not about the it's not about only about woman participation at workplace or childcare it's about the work style and the social system that we Japanese has been taking for granted and that needs fundamental reform. And I think all the necessary political tools are already there and we all know what we need to do. So what we really need now is the commitment from the government and companies and each of the workers to really push through such fundamental reforms through womanomics political tools and we should get on with it and it's either now or never. Thank you very much. Thank you for this your kind invitation to this splendid event lively event and I enjoyed Kitazawa's presentation and mine will be more econometric but I will talk about the advance that we have made and the challenges that remains. I'm going to talk about family friendly policies woman's labor man's household work and fertility. Today's talk is mostly based on my two papers and my past projects. One is the effect of family friendly regulations on fertility evidence from Japan using natural experiments. This was a paper presented at NBR Japan project last year and labor employment association American Economic Association meeting this year in January. And the second paper is the gender division of labor and the second birth labor market institutions and fertility in Japan. This is by myself and Mary Brinton of Harvard University which is forthcoming on demographic research. If I have some time but I don't think I do right now I'm the two papers are quantitative but right now I'm ongoing quantitative quantitative research comparing working mothers in Japan US and Germany. Let me talk about the situation in Japan concerning labor market and fertility. Well gender wage gap is very large. It is 25 percent for full time workers. And the reason for this large gap is different shared in the implicit or explicit employment contract that is the slow track course and the fast track course which is sometimes explicit sometimes implicit. And the share of females in this fast track course is very low. And secondly many women used to quit work at marriage or at their first childbirth and these first and second point led to low percentage of women in managerial position. For the fertility Miss Kitazawa has already given us a very detailed history. Well because Japanese women's life quite changed after marriage and after the first childbirth there have been delay in marriage and postponing of marriage or to non-marriage and because very little non-marital child wearing it's seen in Japan that results in low fertility. Okay let's look at the some data. This is the wage profile. The black line is male full time mean wage by age. So it increases when the experience increases with age and the red line in middle is a female full time wage average. It also shows some increase by age with the increase of the experience. And the third line is the part time wage which shows very near minimum wage show no increase and very low. So we see wage gap between a gender in full time but also we see a very large wage gap between full time and part time workers in Japan. And many women as I said resign work at marriage or at first childbirth and return to this low wage part time work which is enlarging the gender gap. The gender gap between male and female is I said 25% but that is only for full time workers. If we include part time workers the wage gap is much larger. And this is the total fertility rate of Japan and as Ms. Kitazawa said there was 1.57 shock that was called in that terminology by newspapers and by politicians because they were really shocked to find in 1990 that the 1989 TFR was below 1.6. So the politicians tried to do policies that may help work in life balance but the fertility continued to drop till it reached the lowest in 1.26 in 2005. And then it's slowly up turning right now to 1.4 around 1.41. Okay now let me talk about labor market and institutions from the male point of view. Work place conditions and norms as this was also already mentioned there is a we have a tradition or custom of working hours and overtime norms. Also internal labor market is well developed. Tenure is often rewarded by promotions and wage increase. On the other hand the external labor market is very weak so there is less step up job turnover as compared to western countries. And the Japanese Supreme Court has supported these kind of labor practice especially in 60s and 70s that they give employers authority supported employers authority to require employees to relocate and to work overtime in return for high job security. One example is called TOA case where in the it was a dual earning couple and they had small children going to daycare and the husband was relocated to place where they cannot live together and they went to the court and said that they needed husband to balance the family's work because the female also mother was also working and they went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court decision was well the husband knew that he would be relocated every few years because he was in the sales position and this child is healthy enough not in a special condition so because this is a usual practice the family has to take it so this decision really made people to think that it's hard to say no to this relocation order and of course informally you may be able to say no but this relocation is often passed to promotion that many family takes this relocation order and overtime also was order was also supported by the Supreme Court that if the labor employment agreement had some clause on this overtime if the overtime order is within these clause employees are to accept this overtime so regular full-time workers in large firms have few incentives to contest their firm's working conditions this is a survey done by my team it's a web survey to Tokyo metropolitan area Hokuriku and polkai the time leaving office the peak 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. this is married men maybe it's could be surprising to westerners I think and this is for non-married female if you are if you are non-married female at the office the peak is 6 however you can see that many leave like at 7 8 or even 9 p.m. this is for married female so married female are more likely to leave at 5 and 6 and these all include part-time workers so you can see that we really have long working hours for full-time employees okay let's look at labor market institution from female perspective well for female too if you have long full-time workers you are expected to work overtime when required for females too internal labor market is often rewarded by wage increase however looking at the time of the husband's leaving office and the labor practice many wives give priority to the husband's job and quit work at marriage or at first childbirth in the past those housewives are protected within social security system and wage is not taxed nor levied social security premium below about 8000 to 1 million euro per year sorry in Europe many firms give dependent spousal allowance on top of salaries to the household heads so if you are if you are wife of a salary to workers even if you don't pay the social security premium you are protected in healthcare you are given full entitlement for a basic pension and you are also protected for old age care so there is system that support housewives and also system that presuppose husband's long working hours so about 70 to 80 percent of females used to quit work when they had their first child found child out of labor force the quit may be at the marriage or at the pregnancy or at the first child bus but anyways when the first child is one about 70 to 80 to 80 percent of females were found to be out of labor force and the government because of the fertility decline rolled out menu of policies in 1990s equal employment opportunity law that that came before this 1.57 shock it was in late 80s and in 1992 job protected parental leave and leave was implemented and later on leave allowance was also given and they tried to even though very slow increase infant daycare centers however the result was not very effective this is the graph of this blue line is sorry this this blue line is in labor force when your first child is age one and this plus this is about 100 percent so this green line is those who are out of labor force and the national fertility survey has the longest five-year average so I use this national fertility survey for five-year average and you can see that despite the policies in 1990s and 2000s the those in the labor force was around 20 25 percent and those out of the labor force was 70 to 80 percent and showed very little change by the way this is this is the yearly average of panel survey of adults that I'm going to use in the analysis that follows and this is to a panel survey to those who are 20 to 34 in 2002 so these are for all the population these are for to these selected groups but the the percent that the trend was is about similar and so in 2000s government started new policies this time not just childcare leave but they tried to change the firm culture how they did it was first mandatory reporting of the action plans of family friendly policies and plans to the local ministry health labor and welfare office starting from 2005 well if the the firms give this action plan and meets the requirement of government and meet this action plan two to five years later the firms were allowed to use call me mark which is a small mark that one can put on the products and I remember the human resource department trying to find at least one male who takes a parent early because the government required one male to to to take the parental leave to get this clue me mark so around 2003 four I had all the many of the human resource department friends was discussing okay where is this one in this our company so but this as I do interviews to human resource department they say this really kind of change their mindset they had to talk and think about how to implement family friendly policies in the firm they had to think about the future demographic change and they said they had many discussion after this also from 2000 from 2010 reduced our option to work six hours a day when a child is below three was mandated and this I found was a very strong policy okay this is I have now have two more years oops sorry oops two more years at it and this was a previous graph that I showed that but now I have two more years at it and this blue line shows very large increase of those in workforce after 2009 and increase continued so these are the policies that the government did 2005 this registration reporting mandated reporting to large firms of large firms leave allowance was increased to from 40 percent to 50 percent reduced our option to to larger firms that will be effective to first after 2009 and with held portion of leave allowance abolished and reduced our option to all the firms and this is panel survey but I I redeemed this analysis to micro data labor force survey and again I found the same speed up of our continuation after 2009 the data is a ministry of health labor welfare millennium survey of adults and it's an annual panel survey and it's it this is one of the best japanese data because of the high response rate and also we have about 1400 males and females in the data and I used difference in difference and difference in different method econometric method which I'm not going to explain too much I'm just going to the result but what I'm going to do is see whether the the birth rate changed and where continuation changed right after this mandate of reporting and right after the mandate of this shorter option the mandate period was different by the firm side the first mandate was only to those with 301 employees and the second mandate was the timing was different between the employees with 101 and below however of course these large firms and smaller firms are different so what I'm going to do and the increase in births can be affected by economic growth for example so what I'm going to do is to look at the trend of the non mandated firms and look at the trend of the mandated firms and see if there is any special change right after the mandate and if there is I will say that this policy was effective but I'm going to only show you some graph and also the results and not the details okay this is the reduced R policy and the first child birth this round line is when the mandate was announced and you can see that the birth first child birth rate went up right after the mandate and this is a comparing group those without this mandate so the smaller firms they had higher birth rate but you can see that at this mandate at larger firms the birth rate went up if you look at this crude graph I only used 30 to 34 years of old of childless women whether they had children because my data is panel data and so here we have younger people and here they are aging so because fertility is very much affected by age I wanted to control the same age group so in order to do so I only had to I was only able to use those in 30 to 34 but anyways at this crude graph you can see that there was increase in fertility rate and the result is that they reduced our option mandate increased the first child birth and because the first oops I have very few minutes so and the first part was significantly went up marriage significantly went up and where continuation significantly went up and our significantly was reduced so that was the result I have and many other people have recommended the government that we need this reduced our option but it took five to ten years for the government actually to really mandate this but the the the reporting mandate and those those other policy set the mind made the mindset of the company and so that the companies were accepting this mandate by 2009 and but the mandated reporting was not effective in any of these however when I looked at the child desirability among childless women those who replied I definitely want child increase after these two mandates so it may have been effective on the mindset of childless women that of women okay so discussion child care leave alone was not enough changing work norm was very important and reduced our option was very mandate was very effective for those to have child who are delaying their birth uh but I didn't show you the effect on the second and the third birth however it was only effective on the first birth and not the second on another third so my next paper is about the second birth and now I'm going to look at fathers how fathers can as a child care domestic work hour is given uh effect on the is affected by the work norm and how it will affect the birth two minutes okay and there is two empirical research question is there evidence linking from labor practice and work norm among males with Japanese gender specialization at home and is there a negative effect from the work norm at workplace and the behavior of peers and is there evidence linking husband's low work share of household work to reduce the probability of second birth and the method is uh I will look look whether the peer the work peer average domestic work share of peer affect the the the the husband's domestic work and whether the lower husband's share affects the transition to second birth and the estimation of causal effect I used whether if you move if you change the firm size to firm size where the peers have less domestic work share whether it affects their work share or not and about 23 percent change their firm size so I this is how I did the causal effect and the result I'm I can I be very quick the peers does have significant effect if the peer have higher share you are more affected if you go to firm size with lower share your your your domestic work share is also affected also long work hours reduce the domestic work share and okay this is so so this is the result and I won't show you on the effect of the second birth but the lower husband's domestic work share depressed the second birth this was also significant so the conclusion well evidence from many comparative studies show that very low fertility is more likely in the post-insential context when gender inequality in household is high and in Japan labor law that gives job security in return for employees right to relocate in demand over time and the tax and social security system protecting housewife have had some effect in this gender uh uh specialization younger women however hope to continue work and family and the reduced our option and work life balance policy of the government brought strong policy result to increase marriage and the first birth and permanent employed working women which was very good however uh our results suggest that the workplace norm influenced Japanese men's contribution to household work and for working mothers husband's help is is really in need for the second birth so my suggestion is that Japanese employment practice fairly long tenure in one firm and and teamwork while giving job security in exchange of employers right to demand overtime work and relocation needs to be remedied and it may take time but the reform to support your income family with children is a must in the Japanese policy this includes the change in tax and social security policy protecting housewives and I'm not going to talk about this and this uh this was based on uh a fellowship uh which is not from the prime minister but from the prime minister's father by the way so had this started this compolice and the use of the data was allowed under the statistics law and some of the research was also from the next j s p s project both of which I was a principal investigator thank you very much thank you everyone uh i'm nam koshi mayor of otsu so uh some uh many of my points uh very similar uh already mentioned by uh miss kitazawa and professor nagase so i'm gonna talk about what am i doing in otsu so our way otsu is uh uh do you know Kyoto it's next to Kyoto and the population is three hundred forty thousand people i think it's similar uh here in canberra and uh i am at the youngest female mayor and i was i think because uh when i was first elected i was uh 36 it's that's not young but it's because uh there is very few female mayors in japan only two percent and uh so what's happening in japan now and uh so miss kitazawa already mentioned these issues we are losing population and uh less and less children and uh so then what is the next labor shortage and it's happened in some industry like construction and decreased consumption and uh related heat to economy and uh governmental side decreased tax revenue and we have to cut some service to elderly people and we have to we have to plan to close some city facilities so the solution is women and the national government uh last year uh here is a new act so the act for empowerment of women in workforce and uh i think there are two uh problems one is child care and the second is uh at workplace uh long long working hour and uh the first one is child care so as professor nagasa mentioned many women quit work after they have children and uh it's because uh many because they cannot find uh child care they cannot find nursery uh last year uh all over japan uh 20s 23 uh southern japanese family cannot find uh nursery to take care of their children so at that case women have to quit to take care of their children and we call tai chi jido uh it's a waiting child so many child many mothers actually many mothers waiting uh nursery to take care of their children so what did you i do uh in otsu for last uh four years uh so i increased increased cd or service subsidies to private nursery and open new nurseries uh 29 new nurseries for two thousand children then uh so mothers can find a place to take care of their children and now in otsu the birth rate is has increased and also the number of working mother with uh children under the age of five has doubled so this is uh i focus on child care in otsu so now is uh situation is otsu i think is better than other cities so the second problem is a few female leaders and so the first of this uh conference as uh simon mentioned about new female leaders governor of tokyo uh yuiko hoike and renho but still very few and so so three percent corporate executives and 12 percent national leaders and four percent governors and uh two percent mayors so the how about uh otsu city hall the situation is the same uh officially 22 percent employees uh female employees uh management position but actually it's only five uh so excluding nurses and kindergarten teachers only five percent and uh they said uh why they they said they don't want to work they don't want to be promoted because they have to work longer they have to stay office late at night and they have a lot of things to do at home it's very different from their husband so the problem long work hours so this issue already mentioned and uh now uh why am i doing in otsu uh i try to reduce uh work hours so allow overtime uh two days a week also as a problem is uh evaluation system before we evaluate employees based on hours they work but now we try to uh evaluate what they do but it's sometimes hard so the conclusion uh like what we should do is women can stay in work force after they have children and women women can take uh the same role as men then uh the birth rate is up and uh population crisis and labor shortage problem will be solved one survey says if women can work as the same as men in japan japan's gdp will grow up by 20 percent in next 20 years so final conclusion women can save japan but it's very it's easy to say but very hard sometimes i feel very hard because some people are very conservative but uh i'm trying every day thank you thank you so much Naomi you might say you're the youngest uh female mayor just because there are so few women mayors but let me assure you 36 does seem to mean to be pretty young we've got plenty of time for questions or comments just tell us your name and keep it brief yes thank you very much uh my name is mana takashi i'm currently visiting a ferro at the end you um thank you very much for the fascinating presentation i learned a lot and quite impressed as a japanese woman and also like when i was working in the private company in japan i was really feeling uh invisible pressure from many places so yeah it's so impressed um my question is about um actually i'd like to hear about your opinion about the issue of women's poverty in japan because um currently like um many women are suffering from the poverty because they have only kind of like just one million or two million in japanese and as an income per year and usually they are and they're mostly like kind of the divorce man or single mother and sometimes it's very hard to find uh such kind of women because they are even not um part-time workers so um for this issue like what kind of like safety net or uh policy could be a solution to save uh such kind of like uh poverty humans in japan um should we make that for all of you yes no yeah yeah yeah your point is very important many women uh after uh they get divorced it's very hard for them if they have children like they have they have to take care of children and also they have to work and uh so now in otsu like uh i mentioned tai kijido uh it's very hard to get in nursery but if you are single uh it's a first priority uh they can find place take care of children but about the wage uh it's still hard for cities to deal with so private companies so so sometimes uh like so it's very hard that part yeah i i i did survey to single mothers many years ago but i did micro data analysis as well as interviews and surveys and my impression was it is difficult for mothers to work period so so the the interview was done in 2001 so it was a long time ago but um we really need to reform this wage system that prefers head uh bread winners and we really need to change the wage system and whole system and that is required for uh woman to get out of this poverty my answer would be the combination of the subsidies for the single parents it's not just about women and the single father too so those who are raising their kids alone needs to receive more subsidies that's the first option and second will be training more training and resources for the women who tend to be less who tend to have less access to the uh those kind of training so increase the subsidies and training options yes i my name is abuji and i enjoy three presentations very much i'm just curious uh um one one question to kit uh kitanzawa-san uh kitanzawa-san told us a chart of single income and double income uh household and do you have any uh number uh figure single income by wife because because um i'm i'm afraid uh um who are married and after having children the husband he said the wife a quitted job and because uh um his his wife uh earn more so they decided to to uh he decided to be a house uh house husband and some of the child care lives uh in in my case in my experience uh taken by my husband and he said the wife very few but if you have uh any impression of our upside news uh of uh such case that i would appreciate it thank you very much okay i think it's really a good point and i should have a look into that data but i will look into it thank you yes over here carol haze from a new in japanese studies here i have a question for koshi-san i just wondered about if you could give us a bit more information about your um no overtime two days a week policy um do they choose which day or is it like wednesday is a no overtime day and have you had any response from so i presume it's for men and women is it and that have you had any increase in male works work life balance satisfaction because they can go over yeah our first two days are fixed uh june day and thursday and uh and now uh also men uh go to uh home earlier and they are especially young men have uh who have children are very satisfied because before they can't they couldn't take care of their children but now uh young father won't take care of their children so they said yeah they are happy what time did they go first uh as uh five sorry just out of curiosity how would you how do you enforce this rule how do you make it happen what do you mean how enforce it how does it monitor but it's uh we shut down office and uh so they have to go back i know okay yes thanks very much to all three speakers really appreciate your presentations and you've got a really nice picture of the interplay of government policies oh sorry i'm i'm jill from a new join my votes again for me um what i wanted to ask about was in the face of those various policies um and strategies to get women back into the workforce um i wanted to ask what your opinion or experience was of really stubborn social norms and whether uh those policies are having an impact on those uh social norms and if there is any movements to change those social norms because often when i have seen uh the policies put in place i've wondered um in reality for women uh in their workplace is that having a real effect on the norms that they encounter every day both from women and men in the workplace you'd like to go is it working out the social norms i have to be changed yeah according to my impression uh there is increase of women who have permanent work status who also does the household duties and men tend to take their children to nursery which is very different in my in my age very few men went to nurseries but today you often see men taking their children to nurseries but according to my interviews the one of the better couples maybe once a week husband do the over do take care of the child and women do the overtime work but once another once a week will be dependent on paid maid type or a child support type of and well of course there is a change but is there a real equality well uh still much to be done i guess yes colin and then colin lines is my name i'm here in a private capacity my question is for nabuko you referred to the internal and external labor markets and said the internal markets are strong and the external is weak presumably that means there's a strong disincentive for people to seek employment outside their existing employer is that a cultural tradition which is unlikely to change and do you think it has a significant impact on labor productivity which Naomi referred to in her discussion the practice is different between large firms and smaller firms and smaller firms there was ten turnover and which do not increase as much as the larger firms so the incentives to to stay slower at smaller firms whereas if you're an university graduated male who got into this best firms you can expect the wage to increase quite much and uh you you will be losing well there are more increase in job change but still many would like to stay because especially if they stayed up to 30 32 maybe they want to stay there because of the expected wage rise and does this have any effect on productivity well uh in my view uh it does attract uh loyalty of a high uh performance uh males but when the market level when the market change rapidly you might need the new new talent and are we good at recruiting these new talents i don't think so so this is one of the problem even though we i do see some good points about this long-term employment relationship yep yep thanks thank you for the presentation it was very informative and powerful working i have one question to what's your name please uh my name is yusuke fukuta i'm exchange student uh exchange student from japan i'm currently studying and i have one question to mrs k in order to fill the income gap between permanent and non-permanent workers is it necessary for japan to get rid of on seniority-based wage system because the income gap actually increases as the workers get older because the wages for the permanent workers increase due to the permanent seniority-based wage system absolutely i think japanese company needs to shift from the seniority-based system to merit-based system that's the that's i think the uh like a critical base for introducing uh the work sharing too as well give him and and second hi my name is nahoon i've got a question for no no thank you very much for your presentation you mentioned that one of the main ways the main way that we could increase some women's participation in childbirth was the mandated um a lot of working hours after giving birth to a child now i'm just wondering whether that is how how mandated that was was that a absolute poor vision on um a long-working hours because i find that overtime really is a a cultural thing if everyone is giving you pressure or if there's a work culture within the firm for there to be overtime then the women will continue to work regardless of what the policy really is so was that a poor vision on the overtime or wasn't more of a policy that was discretionary as to whether you implemented it or not this work-life balance discussion was became heated after 2005 up to now so large firms they do feel and think that you have to let the women with children go home uh with six hours a day work because it is mandated however we do hear many uh discussion from coli that because we do in a teamwork because the work is not individually based but because it is a teamwork i do hear many complaints from the colleagues which may lead to decline in the new hire of permanent female employee however for those who are already there especially at large firms it they many women do can take six hours a day and actually there is a discussion that more women are taking too long some for good firms so uh let's let the woman to take uh show our option for like nine years or ten years and there's a discussion that this is too long because overtime for men even it's not something that is compulsory um men you know work overtime because there's if the two of them put the cultures that they need to but if you wanted to could you also need a 530 every day or would you sit by no no no you you're not fired however it may dampen your promotion prospect and because you are in this long-term employment relationship especially when you are young and when you think you have the prospect you do not want to dampen it but it doesn't if you work only six hours a day doesn't that also affect their employment yeah yeah that that that is the problem that we are discussing that i i didn't raise hand for the reduced hour when you give a five option because reduced hour is good for balancing but it really dampens career in any country i think in not in japan but in any countries great generous treatment sergeant other companies or businesses that you can point to as models where they've automated very heavily used innovation streamline their business processes to reduce overtime so that there is more family time because to me it's a it's a little bit of a quandary where if you are efficient uh using innovation you're a string lining your processes why would you need so much overtime well in labor economics basically overtime comes from the observation and likely reality that there are high hiring and screening and training costs so using workers who have those skills usually specific training skills and be even paying them more is often a much more sensible business decision than it is to put on extra labor when the extra labor doesn't have the skills that are specific to those tasks but that's just a personal opinion anything to this like this one i'm suggesting unless you're constantly expanding your operations if you purchase a plateau and you're very efficient at that point why would you need so much more overtime because you're very efficient you're very effective in what you're doing according to my interviews in america and in germany i do find that many managers work from home so they go home early like at five or six and eat dinner but after them they often work from home whereas in many germany seem to work at office and and finish and then return maybe this is one difference anyway we have time for one more the two more excuse down here in the middle and up to back hello my name is a lisa and i'm from the university of queensend um my question is for miss koshi um just in relation to women's participation um perhaps in uh the city halls and municipalities um i was just wondering if you could talk on perhaps a sexual harassment that women tend to face in those areas um there was a survey that was recently done that i think i'm not quite sure of the percentage but quite a large number of women have experienced sexual harassment and municipalities and so i was wondering if you could yeah i think that's right at the city hall uh we have some but before they uh don't uh they don't tell there's a some harassment but they if they they think the women think if they report uh it's like embarrassing and they maybe hurt uh other employees so they don't report they didn't report before and now uh i became mayor and i said uh you should report because it's a problem so now uh there are more cases but now i think we are uh shifting or we are changing but i think the bad thing is uh no harassment because there are i think there are harassment everywhere but the if some places they can't report because uh there's some pressure so i think it's we are fixing now what is being done this uh so like uh we have uh new uh we have now uh lawyers out of our office before they have to report their uh boss and it's a man uh sometimes they do harassment so we have some other uh so now they call uh lawyers outside office and uh we are uh trying to change his last last question or comment. Thanks my name is Edward from the University of Melbourne um i certainly agree with your final conclusion that i think you're absolutely right good and can't say in japan um my question is therefore relates to child care and um i noticed you mentioned this uh because you mentioned that uh your your um your city uh subsidizes child care providers um i was wondering whether you had considered in that context whether it may make more sense given the low wages of child care workers to subsidize the child care workers rather than the providers i was wondering whether you thought about that contrast at all and my second question related to immigration and whether uh and where things were up to in japan in terms of filling those child care places worker places through immigration and if you were considering that would you only consider that as as guest workers or would you consider them as permanent migrants or is that out of the question oh yeah i i think boss uh uh your question is uh can you would you subsidize would you consider subsidizing the child care workers rather than the child care provider provider yeah but that's a payment uh so parents have to pay but it depends on their income so if you have uh low income it's you have to pay less and if you have uh like more income you have to pay more so i think we'll close down the questions and but not the answers necessarily if you'd like to add a few comments at the end for all of you would you like to anything to say anything no no so in 1982 peter drystow and yoko sano convened a meeting uh conference at the anu on a comparison of australian and japanese labour markets and yoko sano who was a professor of economics and a woman uh was talking essentially about this issue it didn't have the word woman homics but it was it really was about what she was describing and explaining is there's discrimination in the labour market and a senior person said well if there's so much discrimination how come you made it to professor and i was thinking i don't think anyone's going to say that today and one of the reasons is that this is not a topic which has just seemed to be the eccentricities of female academics and politician change does come but it comes so slowly and the basic proposition that anyone could be any woman could become easy a professor of economics was very weird then and perhaps not so weird although clearly there are lots of spaces to go here i just want to share with you um some policy analysis that comes from the anu by my colleague timothy higgins who's an actuarial statistician who modeled with statistical methods the concept of extending paid parental leave as a household but income contingent debt your arrangements in japan are like ours so people don't get much more than a few months up to six months maybe to look after a newborn child and so your basic choice because it's fundamental market failure banks will not give you money to look after a child you've already signaled that you're not in in the labour force and there's no collateral but what tim did was to ask the question could households get a debt which would be repaid in the future depending on the nature of their level and the arrangements basically their levels of income and he modeled in in a way with a small surcharge that the subsidies were pretty much zero and that's the kind of intervention that i think we could think about which doesn't leave japanese women and women just about anywhere which says three or six months that's all you've got so you must sever the relationship employment relationship which of course will affect all your investment decisions in on-the-job training so i'd recommend that word from tim i'd also recommend that we have lunch but could you first before that thank our speakers for their contribution