United Nations

Economic and Social Council

E/CN.6/2021/NGO/26
Distr.: General
21 November 2020
Original: English

Commission on the Status of Women
Sixty-fifth session
15–26 March 2021
Follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women andto the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly
entitled “Women 2000: gender equality, development andpeace for the twenty-first century”

Statement submitted by International Women’s Year Liaison
Group, a non-governmental organization in consultative status
with the Economic and Social Council *The Secretary-General has received the following statement, which is being
circulated in accordance with paragraphs 36 and 37 of Economic and Social Councilresolution 1996/31.

* The present statement is issued without formal editing.

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StatementInternational Women’s Year Liaison group would like to present our statement
on how Japanese women are still understood by the Japanese G overnment as
subordinate to the head of the household who are dominantly male. We suspect it tobe the conscious bias that is built into our social norm and which is preventing
Japanese women’s full and effective participation and decision -making in all aspectsof our lives, public and private, and has taken enormous efforts of those individual
women who are presently participating in the public sphere.
It all became apparent with the Government policy regarding covid -19. We
sincerely applauded the announcement by the Government, in April 2020, that it will
distribute 12.7 trillion yen (approximately 118 billion USD at 20 April 2020) to all
residents of Japan as a stimulus to shrinking economic activities. Everyone was toreceive one hundred thousand yen (approximately 927 USD). It eventually transpiredthat the money will be remitted, not to individuals, but to a bank account designatedby the head of the household who shall receive the money on behalf of all members
thereof.
This manner of distribution does not guarantee that entitled persons will actually
have access to the money. If the head of the household decides not to receive themoney, for whatever reasons, the rest of the household will be unable to apply for theone-time stipend and deprived of the opportunity to receive it, without notice orconsent. It overlooks the fact that there are those who are hiding from their partners
because of domestic violence and other family troubles. Widely criticized of theserious impact this manner of distribution would have upon the victims of domesticviolence, this defect was eventually redressed. There are couples on the verge ofdivorce, if not just separated. Those people are usually not on speaking terms witheach other and even with a vastly stretched imagination, one cannot expect therecipient to be good enough to hand the precious 100,000 yen over to the other person
however entitled the other might be. If such did happen, they probably would not haveseparated.
Japan enjoyed economic prosperity in the 1960’s when television commercials
blared “Can you work twenty-four hours a day?” It is now the victim of its own
success as society cannot abandon the male breadwinner and female home -makermodel. Today, about two-thirds of all households are two-income families. The
method of distribution ignores the reality of household financial management whichsimply assume that the head of the household manages it all. This is not the only
occasion where household, not individual, is the unit by which Government provides
welfare and other services.
Another way of enforcing this contemporary patriarchy is to discourage womenfrom becoming taxpayers and responsible citizens, the apparent tax policy is to nudge
women to be and remain financially dependent on marriag e. The justification is the
supposedly effective division of labor between man, being compensated for working
in the so-called public sphere, and woman, shouldering the unpaid and invisible workof daily and generational reproduction in the privacy of home . As women arewelcomed into workforce, most people, men and women, assume that she shall workand earn some money, but not really enough to be financially independent, and also
shall bear the lion’s share of chores at home: what we call the double shifts.
Current statistics show that Japanese women in their thirties spend 6.2 times asmuch time for domestic chores, childcare and other care works at home while
Japanese men of the same age cohort spend 1.9 times as much at work, according to
the White Paper published by the Gender Equality Bureau of Japanese Cabinet Office.
Yes, it is the chicken or egg situation: men cannot share the bulk of work at home
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because they work unbelievably long hours, they can only work long hours because
there are someone at home doing the bulk of work there. If women were to work longhours like men, they would have to look for someone to do those work at home, which
is difficult to find as well as psychologically hard for many women who are
conditioned to see themselves as failures as women if they asked others to shoulder
some of their burden. In short, women are led to believe they are living up to thesocial expectation by becoming financially dependent. This social norm works to theadvantage of husbands who eventually will receive higher pensions and to the clear
disadvantage of dependent wives who have forfeited their own old -age pensions andtheir financial independence.
In 2018, the Diet, our legislative branch, enacted the Act to Promote Gender
Equality in Political Field which encourages political parties to select the same
number of male and female candidates to elections of the members of the House ofRepresentatives, the House of Councilors, and other representative entities of local
governments. The act is the fruit of coordinated efforts of many NGOs in persuading
legislators across the board, the importance of sufficient female participation inpolitics. As often is the case, the legislation gently nudges political leaders to selectfemale candidates but without any penalties for not doing so, and parties in power did
get away with selecting less than fifteen percent of their candidates being women, forexample for the 2019 election of the House of Councilors. The most frequent excuse
we noticed was that women are unlikely to be elected and there were few qualified
women as candidates. Are female candidates not taken seriously? Is politics not asuitable job for women? As it appears difficult to alter old customs and ways by justgently nudging, the next step might be setting quota for different groups to ensure
their diverse representations at all levels or to introduce alternating system between
male and female for the listing of candidates. Such steps are the only way to remedy
our Global Gender Gap Index ranking of the World Economic Forum.
In 2016, Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women
invited our legislature to take necessary steps to implement issues which had been
recommended on previous occasions and to which the legislature has not l ived up to
the expectation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women: namely, to domesticate the Convention by introducing acomprehensive definition of discrimination against women in public and private
spheres which will also cover multiple and intersectional forms of discrimination
against women belonging to various minority groups, to establish an independent
national human rights institution in accordance with the Paris Principles, and to adopt
the Optional Protocol. There have been some progress in the areas of equal pay for
equal work (in 2020) and of equal age for marriage (expected to be effective in 2022),
but harassment in workplaces and elsewhere is not prohibited as a crime, and equal
opportunity for education was denied by universities themselves under not-evidencebased but socially acceptable explanation that a large number of female doctors leave
their work on pregnancy, deliverance and childcare.
Introduction of a selective family name procedure to give choice to those whowish to retain their pre-marriage family names, for example, seems not so difficult asuggestion to implement, as it does not coerce those who do not agree. The draft billhas been proposed more than a quarter of a century ago, and opinion polls suggestthat the majority of the population is in favor of adopting the measure. Nevertheless,the idea has been attacked as it will destroy the gendered structure of society. We, as
members of civil society have been working hard to remind t he Government to dotheir homework and follow these essential recommendations of the Committee. We
truly believe that the dawn is not that far away.
We, International Women’s Year Liaison Group, sincerely believe that
unconscious bias ingrained in our social norm is one huge obstacle to our full and20-15744

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effective participation in all aspects of our lives. It is not only the Government but
possibly ourselves as well who might harbor one form of bias or another. Variousvoices from younger generations indicate that they are well aware of the danger ofunconscious bias. By aspiring for a better society of “Equality, Development andPeace”, we trust that we can unearth troublesome unconscious bias and accomplish
full participation of women and men to build that equal society.

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