News/Commentary
India and Japan have more women going to work but the contrast between each nation’s response to this change in the social structure could hardly be more different.
Two separate stories from the Washington Post this week show, in vivid detail, what Indian and Japanese women are up against because they want to have careers.
In India, there is a violent backlash against working women. Against a backdrop of higher unemployment among less-educated men and a general sense of threat to their culture, women are increasingly the targets of violence inside and outside their homes.
India produces many talented people, many innovators in science and technology—the 21st century’s most sought-after specializations.
Yet India’s centuries-old tradition the hostility to females continues and may be worsening, a report says.
Violence begins with a common practice of aborting female fetuses. Resented because they will cost their families marriage dowries some day, families pay for the privilege of handing over their daughters to the husband’s household. Mothers-in-law dominate them. “Bride-burnings” are common. Working women now are subjected to verbal and street attacks.
Japan also produces many talented people. It was not all that long ago when business publications had headlines about Japanese dominance over American business, let’s recall.
For Japan, the newspaper’s headline read: “Japanese Women Shy From Dual Mommy Role.” “As Birthrate Keeps Dropping, Experts Worry About Growing Willingness to Do Without Children—or Childish Husbands.”
At the moment, women face two stark choices, says the story. They can have their careers, without marriage or children. They can have the family track, which makes them full-time mothers into their mid to late 40s.
“East Asia’s most prosperous countries now have the lowest birthrates in the world,” says the Post.
INDIA
“For India’s middle-class urban women, the past decade has brought unprecedented opportunities to advance in a social order long dominated by men. But a powerful male backlash has accompanied the women’s revolution, an upwelling of resentment that has expressed itself in sexual violence and harassment.
“In India today, women are working in lucrative retail and technology jobs, sometimes in cities far from their home towns. Economic independence has, in some cases, allowed them to delay marriage and early childbirth. Social mobility among India’s young is also undermining the country’s traditional joint-family system, in which couples are expected to move in with the husband’s parents. The shift has empowered the modern Indian wife, freeing her from the scourge of the bossy, nosy mother-in-law.
“At the same time, however, the number of reported instances of domestic violence, rape and dowry killings is spiking in South Asian cities, according to women’s groups, demographers and sociologists.
“Violence against women is the fastest-growing crime in India, a recent study concluded. Every 26 minutes a woman is molested, every 34 minutes a rape takes place, and every 43 minutes a woman is kidnapped, according to the Home Ministry’s National Crime Records Bureau. (Emphasis added)
“With about 19,000 reported rapes a year, India ranks fifth highest in that category out of 84 countries studied, according to a 2006 report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. But women’s groups say fewer than 2 percent of women who have been sexually assaulted in India report the crime to police, largely because the social stigma attached to rape may undermine a woman’s chance for marriage.”
JAPAN
“Women on Strike,” a recent report on Japan’s falling birthrate by the securities firm CLSA, noted that the number of children per married Japanese woman has held steady for three decades. “This suggests that the decrease in fertility is due almost entirely to an increase in women of reproductive age not getting married and not having children,” the report said.
“Regional leaders are waking up to the growing reluctance of working women to complicate their lives with children — and with husbands who refuse to help raise them. A very high percentage of Japanese women eventually do marry, but by postponing it they narrow the window for bearing children.
“We need to organize our society so that women and families will be able to raise children while working,” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in an interview in May. “I think we still lack adequate efforts on that front.”
“This year, Fukuda’s government is pushing a “work-life balance” program that addresses the country’s famously punishing work ethic. It pressures companies to shoo workers (primarily men) out of the office at night. The intent is to improve the quality of family life and, in the process, make more babies.
“The stakes are high here in the world’s second-largest economy, which now has the world’s highest proportion of people over 65 and lowest proportion of children under 15. According to a recent forecast, population loss will strip Japan of 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.
“Like many other East Asian economies with a shrinking workforce, Japan desperately needs women to marry and have children while also continuing to work. But only about a third of women in Japan remain in the workforce after having a child, compared with about two-thirds of women in the United States.
“Corporate discrimination against women, especially if they have children, remains rampant, despite laws that forbid it. Last year Japan ranked 91st in gender equality among 128 countries surveyed by the World Economic Forum.”
Source: The Washington Post, August 25, 2009 (India)
Source: The Washington Post, August 28, 2008 (Japan)