Low Female Labour Force Participation

  East Asian women are often discouraged from staying employed, especially after marriage, by cultural, economic and institutional constraints. China, Japan and South Korea, the three most developed economies in the region, have no more than 60% of female labour force participation rate in 2020. In contrast, all have over 70% of male labour force participation rate (World Bank, 2020). There has been an entrenched tradition of the husband being the breadwinner and the wife being the full-time homemaker. The majority of men are reluctant to perform housework. According to Yamaguchi, husbands in dual-career families share only around 5% of housework in Japan, compared to 35% in the US (Kazuo, 2019, 23). 

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 Not only do modern-day practices fail to eliminate the anachronistic stereotype, but they have also reinforced it through the economic system. In Japan, where long working hours are expected from all regular employees, companies adopt the household rather than the individual as a unit when they support employees’ work-family balance. Women are, therefore, presumed to prioritize their role in the family. Unable to fulfil both responsibilities at home and in the workplace, most of them would quit their jobs or be forced to work as non-regular employees (ippan shoku) which is exempt from long working hours but much lower paid than the regular ones (Kazuo, 2019, 24). A similar situation is seen in China after it embraced the market economy. In the era of the planned economy, men and women had equal access to child care and lifetime employment which hugely diminished the opportunity costs for women in the labour market. The government removed these benefits under the market economy. Chen, who was 28 years old during the time of the news and had a degree from a top overseas university, was rejected by all companies she applied to. She said ‘the interviewers would be very direct with me and say that even though I have the qualifications they’re looking for, since they expect me to get married and have a child soon they won’t hire me’ (Chiu). Her experience reflects the harsh reality East Asian women generally face when searching for employment opportunities. The Chinese labour participation rate plunged significantly, in particular the participation of mothers with preschool-age children. The gap between the participation rates of men and women was widened by 3.5% from 2000 to 2010.

 

Women who are from low-income families and less educated are even more vulnerable to unemployment than those who have a higher degree of education (Bohong et al. 2016, 41). This shows that the employment opportunities for women are far less than men’s.

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Wide Gender Pay Gap

  The wide gender pay gap has been prevalent in East Asia due to unequal access to the job market and statistical discrimination against women. There are limitations on the types of jobs that women have access to. Companies tend to place women in positions for which other workers can easily replace them if they leave the jobs due to the high average turnover rates for women (Kazuo, 2019, 86). Women were also concentrated in jobs that showed the social extension of their family roles such as nurses, teachers and secretaries. Higher paid occupations such as engineers, technicians and senior managers are mostly men. Often women prefer jobs with lower requirements of technical skills and knowledge to balance between work and family. 
 

  The Seoul Metro, which runs the Korean capital’s subway, was disclosed to have deliberately lowered the interview scores of female applicants in 2016, claiming that ‘it was a job that women couldn’t take on’. East Asian women constantly face similar discrimination when they seek jobs that do not fit their traditional roles. The tax system in Japan disadvantages well-paid spouses by exempting spouses with earnings below 1.05 million yen from income tax which encourages one of them, usually the wife, to work part-time in non-regular employment to limit their earnings. 

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  All these factors considerably reduce their employment opportunities and income compared to men’s. In China, women comprised only 24.4% of the highest income group while accounted for 65.7% of the lowest income group in 2010 (Bohong et al. 2016, 34). South Korea and Japan were the top two countries that had the largest gender wage gap among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in 2019, which are 32.5% and 23.5% respectively (OECD). Research found that in 2014 over 53% of employed females who were 20 to 65 were working as non-regular workers who have significantly low wages, compared with merely 14.1% of employed men (Yamaguchi). The gender pay gap is a serious problem in the region. 

 

Absence of Female Leaders in the Workplace

The restricted access to the job markets, the culture that does not encourage female labour participation and the unfair payment based on gender have profoundly shrunken the chances of women staying employed for promotion.

 

The characteristics of the business world in East Asia are deemed masculine, reflecting authoritarianism, informal networking and workaholism which traditionally exclude women. 

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According to Nemoto, most of the Japanese men she interviewed value homosocial bonds and informal networking through drinking as a way to gain promotion opportunities to which women lack access. One of the female interviewee, Rika, who worked at Shijo Asset Management, shared her own story saying that “My boss would never include me in meetings and told me to go to the “women-only” meetings with the non-career-track women’ (Nemoto, 2016, 144). The 2016 Basic Survey on Equality of Employment Opportunity by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Wealth indicated that Japanese women hold only 6.4% of the positions of department director, 8.9% of section head and 14.7% of task-unit supervisor. Yamaguchi concurred by showing that 80% of male college graduates that were regular white-collar employees with more than 30 years of service duration successfully attained managerial positions, compared to only 30% of female college graduates who had the same background (Yamaguchi, 2019, 75). 

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In China, the situation is much better with rising women participation in top management positions. However, there is still gender discrimination facing female leaders. For example, women have to retire 5 years earlier than men which could damage their career advancement chances and hinder them reaching higher-level positions.