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Women's Employment after the First Childbirth in Japan
The employment patterns of Japanese women show unique features among industrial societies. They are; relatively lower employment rate of mother of infants while higher employment rate of women as a whole, and unclear impact of higher educational attainment on women’s employment. This paper tries to explore reason for them by analyzing employment patterns and their determinants of women mainly born in the 1960s and the 1970s.
There are several reasons for focusing on the women’s employment patterns of these cohorts. First, it is worth exploring why employment rate of mothers are still low regardless of some policy changes aiming at gender equality, such as Childcare Leave Act and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act for Men and Women, which were enacted and expanded after the 1990s when women of these birth cohorts had their childbirth.
Second, more women of these birth cohorts pursued higher education, and got into the workforce after graduation, compared to the earlier birth cohorts. Investigating the reason why they could not utilize their human capital in the workforce is another important issue because even more women of subsequent birth cohorts have been seeking for university degrees.
Using Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (JPSC), this paper presents descriptive analyses on employment patterns around the time of their first childbirth, and results of multinomial logistic regression analysis on determinants of women’s employment status at a year after the first childbirth. The main finding of analysis is that type of occupation rather than educational attainment has a significant impact on Japanese women’s regular employment after the first childbirth. Based on the results of data analysis, the interaction between labor market structure and social policy, and its impact on women’s employment and gender role in Japan will be discussed.