EDN: https://elibrary.ru/qbvwvc
DOI: 10.21064/WinRS.2025.3.3
Empowering women and increasing gender equality became a priority development strategy in 2013 but has been in the focus of the Japanese government since the 1990s.
However, despite the efforts made and the advanced level of economic development — Japan has been among the five largest and most technologically advanced economies in the world for over half a century — the country is at the bottom of the world gender equality rankings, neighboring there not with the OECD countries, but with the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. This study is devoted to the analysis of the evolution of Japanese policy towards women, its driving forces, man instruments, and their effectiveness. The analysis is based on the approach of economics of inequality of opportunity and agency, and the methodology of the analysis is the index of axial institutions, which include the family and labor market, education and science, public and corporate governance. The study of the development of policy towards women and gender equality allows us to identify three main driving forces: self-organization of Japanese women, economic and demographic problems that have awakened the interest of the Japanese government, and Western and global trends. An analysis of the core institutions shows contradictory results of gender policy. Thus, within the framework of the family institution, stimulating involved fatherhood yields positive results: Japanese men’s time expenditure on unpaid domestic labor is growing. However, this trend does not alleviate the double burden of women and does not reduce women’s time expenditure on domestic labor. The labor market is characterized by an increase in female participation, having reached and even surpassed the key goal of womenomics. Nevertheless, the wage gap remains one of the highest in OECD countries, which is due to the persistence of horizontal and vertical segregation in the labor market, the predominance of women among those temporarily and part-time employed, and the double burden effect. A similar picture emerges in the other core institutions — education, science, and management. Thus, with the actual growth of women in education and science, horizontal and vertical segregation remains. Management remains the most closed sphere for women due to the lack of decisive measures to overcome the traditions and stereotypes that have developed in Japanese society.