Global Pressure, Local Results: The Impact of CEDAW on Working Women in Japan

Global movements have institutionalized and promoted equal employment opportunity rights in the international community, shaping laws and work conditions on a national level. This article illustrates the history of equal employment opportunity law reform, tracing local-international linkages. How have global movements for equal employment opportunities influenced legal reform processes and employment conditions in a society with a traditional gender-role culture and a rigid employment structure? Analyses of the legal reforms in Japan and of country reports for and responses from the United Nations’ Committee for the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) show how women’s employment rights have expanded on a national level. The developments in women’s employment rights in Japan, in areas such as family leave, sexual harassment, and indirect discrimination prohibitions, consistently follow Japan’s interactions with CEDAW. Gender discrimination in employment continues to be pervasive throughout the world. Parts of the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) were intended to combat *An earlier version of this article was prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association held on August 1–4, 2008. The author thanks Elizabeth Heger Boyle and Sara Evans for their suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this article. 449 2009, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc. doi: 10.2190/WR.13. 4.f http://baywood.com discrimination against women in employment. While some researchers conclude that CEDAW has been helpful (Chan-Tiberghien, 2004; Liu & Boyle, 2001), others argue that it has offered no real benefit to the women of the world (see Minor, 1994). Japan is a particularly interesting country to study because by the early 1980s its management practices were often described as an example for the rest of the world. Yet, during this time gender discrimination in employment carried no legal penalty. Today, working women in Japan have far more workplace rights than they did in the early 1980s. Japan passed its Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL) in 1985, and this was followed by a series of related legal reforms. One important example of these is that women in Japan can now sue employers for sexual harassment and win the case. They also have a family leave policy that is more generous than before. In addition, employers have amended job titles to remove direct references to employees’ gender and have allowed a handful of women to perform management jobs that used to be restricted to men only. Is this recent improvement in Japan coincidental or is it thanks to CEDAW? This article provides a case study of the effectiveness of CEDAW in regulating gender discrimination in Japan and illustrates its EEOL-related legal reform history, tracing the local-international linkages during the time of the expansion of Japanese women’s rights. Neo-institutionalists and scholars of Japan (Brinton, 1993; Chan-Tiberghien, 2004; Lam, 1992; Liu & Boyle, 2001) have shown that these legal reforms resulted from international political pressure for Japan to conform to CEDAW. Similarly, former policymakers in Japan (Akamatsu 2001, 2003; Akamatsu & Yamashita, 2003; Osawa, 2003, 2005) have published works on the power of international political pressure in Japan’s policy reform, particularly focusing on the national level. These insightful studies, however, have neither investigated the processes of social transformations in women’s employment rights resulting from local-international links nor revealed the mechanisms for this change in the era of globalization. How have global movements for equal employment opportunities influenced the legal reform processes of and employment conditions in a society with a traditional gender-role culture and a rigid employment structure (Strober & Chan, 1999)? By mapping Japan’s legal reform history and related events, this study provides an overview of Japan’s legal change processes in a global context. This research shows how the United Nations, as a premier international and global organization, through its programs and provisions can produce a progressive improvement in the conditions of women. GLOBAL NORM OF WOMEN’S EMPLOYMENT RIGHTS International Movements for Women’s Rights The earlier women’s movements in the world focused on suffrage and issues surrounding reproduction (Barrett & Tsui, 1999; Ramirez, Soysal, & Shanahan, 1997). Since World War I, international governmental organizations, such as the 450 / SHINOHARA