SNA (Atlanta) — Japan is struggling with both income inequality and poverty, but the burden is not shared equally between the genders; impoverished women suffer the most.

Japan’s official poverty rate is listed as 15.7%, a middling ranking among G7 nations, but there is strong reason to believe that in Japan the structural economic disadvantages faced by women are steeper than in most other advanced countries.

In Japanese workplaces, there is typically a substantial discrepancy between regular and non-regular employees when it comes to job security, work benefits, and compensation. Moreover, during recessions or when companies are restructuring, non-regular employees tend to be the first to lose their livelihoods. Even most Japanese labor unions make little effort to protect the non-regular staff, focusing their attentions on serving regular employees.

Women tend to be relegated to non-regular work much more often than men.

The Japan Statistics Bureau reports that in the age group of 15 to 24, the gap between women and men hired as non-regular employees is actually very small, but as workers get older, the gap widens. By the time they reach the 25 to 34 years old age group, 34.2% of female employees are non-regular, while only 14.3% of males fall into this category. From there it gets worse: In the age group from 35 to 44 years old, 49.6% of women and only 9% of men are hired as non-regular employees.

The main reason why women fall behind economically can be traced to peculiar customs within Japan’s work culture. Women are often expected to leave their jobs when they become pregnant. And in Japan’s traditional “lifetime” employment system, once a worker leaves their job, there are few opportunities to rejoin and to recapture their position on the seniority ladder.

This is part of the reason why Cabinet Office’s Gender Equality Bureau recently reported that only 13.3% of those involved in managerial work in Japan are women (a figure which compares to 41.1% of managers in the United States).

The situation is doubly harsh for single mothers, as the structure of both government support and the business world effectively assumes that people live within traditional family units. Single mothers are trapped between options of staying home with their children or bearing the extra expense of daycare–and sometimes daycare options are not even available.

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) reports that single mothers, on average, receive an annual salary of approximately ¥2 million (US$18,000), while single fathers earn nearly double that amount, ¥3.98 million (US$36,000).

The Covid pandemic has produced additional evidence of income inequality between the genders.

The Gender Equality Bureau noted that after the first state of emergency declaration was issued in April 2020, the number of employed and self-employed women in the nation decreased by 700,000, while men witnessed a decrease of only 390,000.

The tenuous economic position of Japanese women has another knock-on effect, which is that it leads to higher rates of childhood poverty for both genders.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) stated in a 2018 report said the number of children living below the poverty line in Japan is 13.4%, a higher rate than most other G7 nations.

The MHLW breaks this down further in a report issued in 2016, noting that, as of that time, there were an estimated 1,232,000 single mother households and 187,000 single father households in Japan, and that overall the child poverty rate for single-parent households was 56%. This means, of course, that the lower compensation and benefits provided to women, who are much more likely to be non-regular employees, also creates hardship for the nation’s youngest and most vulnerable people.

Research assistance for this article was provided by Kentaro Kato

For breaking news, follow on Twitter @ShingetsuNews