COVER STORY • 5Guilt, Gender & an
Inclusive Recovery:a Lesson from Japan
Author Chie Aoyagi

By Chie Aoyagi

Japan SPOTLIGHT Introduction

The economic shock initiated by the pandemic in 2020, the worst since World War II, has most seriously
affected the non-permanent employees in the service sector in Japan, such as retail shops, restaurants,
and the tourism business where face-to-face encounters with customers are the principal part of theemployees’ work. With limited face-to-face services and significant declines in business operations, theseservice businesses had no choice but to lay off workers. In particular, non-permanent employees or parttime workers, mostly women in Japan, are the ones who have suffered most from this pandemicrecession. “Womenomics”, a policy to encourage women’s participation in the labor force, is certainly oneof the most successful of the Abenomics policies. Given Japan’s depopulation and rapidly aging society,womenomics could be a crucial policy to achieve sustainability in economic growth and productivity.
Japan needs to overcome this pandemic’s adverse effects on working women and restore the merits ofwomenomics as quickly as possible.
Dr. Chie Aoyagi, an economist in the IMF African Department, published a paper on the IMF’s Blog about
her views on the positive aspects of teleworking now widely adopted by Japanese companies during thepandemic with regard to working women. With her permission as well as IMF’s, we reproduce her paper asbelow.
Japan’s voluntary month-and-a-half shutdown of the economy inApril due to COVID-19 has had a higher cost for women than men. Akey reason: a “guilt gap” between women and men, where womenoften feel compelled to take on more professional sacrifices.
Close to one million women – the majority of whom worked in
temporary and part-time positions – left the labor force between
December and April.
Amid massive disruptions to childcare and schools, research in an
IMF Working Paper (https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/11/27/Guilt-Gender-and-Work-Life-Balance-in-Japan-AChoice-Experiment-48701) has helped solidify a universal truth:
Women rather than men often face greater responsibility and guilt
for being neither the ideal mother nor the ideal employee.
If the labor market was more supportive of work-life balance, thenwe may have seen a more balanced outcome during the pandemic
with both men and women stepping in to help with children. Policies
to promote better work-life balance and gender equality will also be
critical to help enhance female employment opportunities andcareers in the “new normal” after the pandemic is under control.

Working Toward an Inclusive Recovery
The working paper’s findings are increasingly relevant in planninga more inclusive economic recovery. What aspects of a job improve
work-life balance, and how much income should the job offer? Inanswering this question for workers in Japan we investigated thetradeoffs men and women would accept between earning more pay
22 Japan SPOTLIGHT • January / February 2021

or having more time at home.
An analysis is drawn from an experiment that surveyed nearly
1,000 working-age Japanese men and women on their preference forvarying levels of job attributes affecting work-life balance, including
overtime, job insecurity, risk of departmental transfer, and risk ofgeographical relocation.
First, it was found that women are more willing than men tosacrifice a significant amount of salary in exchange for greater worklife balance.
For instance, for certain age and salary ranges, mothers are willingto sacrifice approximately $3,000 more in annual salary than men to
avoid relocation risk; they would forgo roughly $6,500 more thanTABLE

The cost of work-life balance

How much parents are willing to pay annuallyto avoid certain job demands.

(Estimation Figure in US$ – converted from yen at rate of$1 = 110 yen)
Non-wage job AttributeOvertime (45+ hrs./mo.)Job Insecurity

Fathers

Mothers$8,682$15,236$864$3,827Chance of Mandatory Transfer$7,464$12,155

Chance of Mandatory Relocation$1,891$4,909Note: Specific to Japanese workers in their 30s earning less than 3 million yen (US$28,000) who have an undergraduate or higher education.

Source: Aoyagi & Munro (2019)https://www.jef.or.jp/journal/

men to avoid 45+ hours of overtime per month. Men who do nothave children are on average more willing to trade wages for worklife balance than those with children.

The Guilt Gap
Part of this gender difference in willingness to pay for better worklife balance can be explained by a greater sense of guilt among
women than men. Women reported higher feelings of guilt than men
for missing not just child-related activities (e.g., school events), butalso cooking and taking care of parents, because of work.
These feelings of guilt were then run against preferences. Overall,higher levels of guilty feelings correspond to greater willingness topay for more work-life balance. For example, these feelings of guilttranslate to high willingness to pay to avoid overtime. Women whowould feel highly guilty for missing a child’s event or not caring fortheir parents are willing to sacrifice $12,000 in their annual wage toavoid 45+ hours a month of overtime.

Policy Implications
This analysis contributes to the policy debate over work-lifebalance in Japan – a country famous for its long work hours. A
recent index (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/work-lifebalance/) from the Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment ranked Japan 35th out of 40 countries in terms ofwork-life balance. Japan’s work culture is in many ways a legacy ofdecades past, when most women quit their jobs after getting married
to raise a family while their husbands became the sole breadwinners.
The Japanese work ethic often required men to work overtime andrelocate based on company needs. An aging population and limited
wage growth after the 1990s, though, spurred greater female
participation in the labor market, pressuring policymakers to meetdemands for more flexible work arrangements. In recent years,
Japanese policymakers, recognizing the economic importance ofempowering women, elevated gender equality as a public priority.
But implementation has been challenging, in part due to the issues
highlighted in this working paper.
The findings have several policy implications.
First, it seems to validate one policy proposal in Japan – theuse of more “limited-regular” contracts. These labor contracts set
limits on overtime and mandatory relocations for workers intraditional, permanent jobs. Wider availability of such employment

options would increase productivity and thus wages for thosecurrently under non-regular contracts. Men and women alike benefit
from such arrangements, but these contracts may appeal to working
mothers especially because the majority of them are currently nonregular employees with lower pay and job security.
Second, policymakers need to be sensitive to the gender-based
differences in guilt. Care needs to be taken to ensure that limitedregular contracts do not further entrench gender-gaps in theworkplace and create new glass ceilings for women.
Finally, mobility across contracts is important. For example,workers can switch contracts based on their life stage; a worker may
prefer limited-regular contracts when children are small, but maybe
not later when children leave the nest.

Building Resilience for the Future
The pandemic and widespread teleworking have shaken the longstanding stereotype of Japan’s “salaryman”. Even in Japan’s
demanding work culture, the evidence shows that working men andwomen place value on a reasonable balance between the office andhome. With the right policies, this pandemic can serve as a catalyst
for empowering women and creating the flexibility for a work-lifebalance that better supports equality. If we want to build a more
resilient society, gender equality must be a top priority.
The views expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) anddo not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive
Board, or IMF management.

Chie Aoyagi is an economist in the IMF African Department. She holds a BA
in international development studies from the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA) and MA and PhD in economics from the National Graduate
Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo, Japan.

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