ABSTRACT
The Equal Employment Opportunities Law was enacted in 1989 under strong pressure after Japan signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1980. Being heavily criticised as ‘toothless’, the law was amended in 1999 to prohibit discrimination in recruitment, training, promotion and remuneration. Nevertheless, gender discrimination at workplaces has continued: companies, especially larger ones, have devised a ‘dual-track system’, which has separated workers between ‘career’ and ‘general’ tracks and continued differential treatment and indirect gender discrimination. In a recent Human Development Report (United Nations Development Programme, 2005), Japan ranks forty-third, according to a gender empowerment measure (GEM) that gauges gender-equal participation in economic and political activities and decision-making. One of the scores constituting the GEM is the percentage of women legislators, senior officials and managers. The rate in Japan was just 10 per cent of the total; only seven countries had lower percentages among the eighty-four countries whose data were compared.
