Equal Employment Opportunity Law and the gender wage gap in Japan: A cohort analysis

Abstract

In this article, I perform a cohort-based analysis of the female-to-male wage gap using aggregate data in Japan from 1975 to 2005. While the inter-cohort closing in the gender wage gap is apparent, the convergence is smaller when the gap is calculated for each level of education. This pattern suggests that a certain portion of the gender wage convergence is due to changes in the educational composition of the workforce. I find that educational composition changes played a larger role in closing the pay gap for younger cohorts than it did for older cohorts. Highly educated women who entered the labor market after the enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law gained in that they had more regular full-time employment but did not experience wage gains relative to their male counterparts.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Law and labor force behavior of women in Japan

“…For senior high school and junior college graduates, most coefficients of cohort dummies are small in magnitude and are statistically insignificant, implying that RERs of women did not change much relative to their male counterparts. Therefore, for senior high school and junior college graduates, the loss in regular employment for cohorts born 27 Regression results that use a slightly different dependent variable and the same independent variables are reported in Table 3 of Abe (2010); the estimates are the same as in Table B1, except for signs. In that article, the main focus is to understand the convergence in regular employment ratios across genders.…”

Distributional changes in the gender wage gap in the post-apartheid South African labour market

“…Internationally, studies report an increased labour force participation of women, attributed inter alia to the closure of the gender gap in education (Ganguli et al 2014), advances in medicine such as the introduction of the contraceptive pill (Goldin and Katz 2002), equal employment legislation (Abe 2010), and technological progress, both in the labour market and in the home (computers, microwave ovens) (Blau and Kahn 2000;Petrongolo and Olivetti 2006).…”

“…The focus of the post-apartheid government since 1994 has been to tackle all forms of inequality and discrimination through various policies and legislation (Burger and Jafta 2010). Internationally, while some studies find a positive link between equal employment legislation and labour force participation (Abe 2010), the effect of equal employment legislation on the gender wage gap is less clear (Abe 2010;Polachek 2014). The availability of 55 cross-sections of household survey data allows the examination of how the demise of apartheid and the introduction of equal employment legislation has affected the gender wage gap in the South African labour market, thus contributing to the literature.…”

The gender division of labor and second births: Labor market institutions and fertility in Japan

“…Japanese women are rarely found in career-track jobs (Brinton and Mun 2016;Mun and Brinton 2014) and when they are they tend to be uneasy about their future because balancing work and family is difficult due to the long work-hour norms (Nagase and Yamaya 2011). While the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1985 and its subsequent amendment in 1997, 1999, and 2007 opened the career track to a small number of women, analysis of 1990s data shows little effect of the law on female employment (Abe 2010(Abe , 2011. In a probit analysis of labor force participation, employment among new mothers indeed decreased among younger cohorts in the 1990s and early 2000s, despite the favorable changes in childcare leave.…”