Japan Press Weekly

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2018 August 15 - 21 TOP3 [LABOR]

Female workers quitting their jobs to give birth results in economic loss of 1.2 trillion yen

Loss of careers by women workers due to childbirth brings about 1.2 trillion yen in damage to the Japanese economy annually. This was shown in calculations which a private thinktank recently released.

In a report published by the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute Inc. (DLRI), in 2017, the number of female workers who quit their jobs after giving birth reached 200,000. This means that their annual earnings totaling 635 billion yen were gone. Among the 200,000 workers, 79,000 worked as regular workers and 116,000 were non-regular workers, according to the institute report.

The DLRI report points out that resignations by 200,000 workers also bring about negative impact on companies’ productivity and other business activities and that Japan thus suffers a GDP loss of 1.2 trillion yen annually.

Furthermore, explaining that normally, women who left their jobs due to childbirth have difficulties in re-entering the labor market as a regular worker, the report states that this is another factor that affects the Japanese economy negatively.

More specifically, the report cites an example in which a woman worker resigned from her job at the age of 30 for childbirth and 10 years later returned to her workplace as a non-regular worker. The report states that if this worker continued to work as a regular worker, she would have earned 83.7 million yen more in her career.

The career losses of the 79,000 female full-time workers amounts to 6.5 trillion yen. Combined with companies’ business losses, Japan’s lost GDP amounts to 12.1 trillion yen.

In the report, the thinktank noted that to build more childcare centers and to make the public childcare support program friendlier to working mothers would help to encourage women workers to keep working even after having a baby.

Past related articles:
> Abe’s ‘women empowerment’ policy does nothing to remove glass ceiling [August 4, 2018]
> Lifetime wages for part-timers are \100 mil. less than for full-timers [February 25, 2017]