Nobuko Ito is the very model of a modern professional Japanese woman.

She is a qualified lawyer and she speaks fluent English. She has years of experience working in international contract law.

But Nobuko no longer works in a big international law firm.

Today she works from a small office near her home. She works a fraction of the hours she used to, and for a fraction of the money.

The reason? Nobuko has three children. In Japan balancing work and motherhood is still extremely hard.

“Before I had a child I remember one busy month where I billed the client for 300 hours!” Nobuko says.

“I’d get in the office at 09:00 in the morning, and leave at 03:00 the next morning, and I’d come in on Saturday and Sunday.

“If you want to keep working you have to forget about your children, you have to just devote yourself to the company.

“I can’t do this, it’s impossible.”

As Nobuko’s example shows Japan’s working culture can be brutal. It’s one of the reasons why 70% of Japanese women still give up work as soon as they have their first child.

Another is their husbands.

When it comes to housework Japanese men are still far behind their counterparts in Europe or America.

In Sweden, Germany and the US husbands spend, on average, three hours a day helping out with children and household chores. In Japan it’s one hour, and they spend just 15 minutes a day with their children.

Then there is paternity leave. Japanese men are entitled to take it, but only a tiny minority actually do – just 2.63%, according to the Health and Welfare ministry.

“My husband didn’t take paternity leave” Nobuko Ito says.

“Most Japanese men are very hesitant to use the system. They may want to come back home to help with the family, but on the other hand they think they need to work as hard as possible otherwise they may not get promoted, or they may lose their job.”

Despite all this many Japanese women do want to continue working after they have children.

But they then come up against the next problem – childcare, or rather the lack of it.

According to the Tokyo government’s own statistics there are 20,000 children in the city waiting for places in day-care centres.

The government centres that do exist are good, but they are far too few. And even if you do get a place it’s means-tested and can be expensive – around 70,000 Yen ($737, £484) per month for the first child.

“I’d get a discount for having three children, but it would still be at least $1,000 a month even at the state nursery,” says Nobuko Ito.

“At an expensive private nursery it can cost $2,000 a month per child. But those are really good!” she says laughing.

All of this adds up to two things. Women who are having children are not working. Women who are working are not having children. Both are terrible for Japan’s future.

In her ground-breaking work Womenomics: Japan’s Hidden Asset, Japanese-American economist Kathy Matsui says getting more Japanese mothers to stay in work or go back to work should be a “national priority”.

She says it could add as much as 15% to Japan’s GDP.

But Matsui says there is another even more pressing reason. Japan is running out of people.

“Although a low fertility rate is common among other developed countries, Japan may be the only OECD nation where the number of pets exceeds the number of children,” she says.

Japan’s birth rate is just 1.37 births per woman, far below the 2.1 figure at which a population remains stable.

Evidence from Europe and America suggest helping women to stay in work can increase the birth rate.

In countries like Sweden, Denmark and the US, where female employment rates are high, birth rates are also higher. In countries where female employment is low, like Italy, South Korea and Japan, birth rates are also low.

In Japan a demographic crisis is already under way. In 2006 Japan’s population began to shrink.

If current trends persist it will lose a third of its population in the next half century.

Nothing like that has ever happened before.

Source:

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes BBC News, Tokyo

BBC News 22 March 2013

                         Image Source: www.lesechos.fr

Confounding the idea that women must choose between career and family, a new French study has found that the more women work, the more babies they have.

The latest study by the French demographic institute Ined shows an overall increase in the fertility rate in the developed countries that make up the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), with specific evidence that increased female professional activity has helped spur the current mini baby boom.

While working women have less time to take care of a child, they earn enough money to afford the extra costs usually linked to having a baby. The scenario is particularly evident in Scandinavian countries and in France, where the fertility rate is among the highest of the OECD (French women currently have an average of 2.1 children) and which have good child-care facilities and government policies that allow working parents take time off when babies are born.

“In most of the richest countries, the rebound of the fertility rate is linked to a higher employment rate of women,” write the study’s authors, Angela Luci and Olivier Thévenon. “The possibility for women to be able to reconcile work and family appears to be a key factor” in the rising birth rates.

In Germany, though parental leave policy has been reformulated, the child-care system has not kept pace, which could explain the country’s low birth rate (1.4 per woman).

The last key element, however, where progress is lacking is on the share of household chores, historically a detriment to women’s progress. According to France’s national statistics office, women still spend three and a half hours a day doing housework.

The researchers note that the overall birthrate in OECD countries has risen from 1.69 children per women in 1995 to 1.71 in 2008, with the largest increase in Spain, France, Belgium, Britain and Ireland, all among the more wealthy developed countries. In itself, this rising rate undermines the widely accepted notion that rising wealth leads to a lower birth rate.

Source: Blog by Les Echos

Read the original research note in English or French: Population and Societies

Read the French articles in Le Monde, Les Echos or Nouvel Obs