Abstract
Post-war Japan has seen considerable change with regard to women. The 1946 Constitution guaranteed for the first time, the equality of men and women under the law. Subsequently, the revised Civil Code and a range of domestic laws, including the Fundamental Law of Education and the Labour Standards Law, prompted improvements in the legal status of women in the society as a whole. At the workplace, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1986 prohibits discrimination of women with regard to recruitment, job assignment and promotion. Despite these reforms, the equality of men and women is not achieved in practice. The persistence of a gender inequality in Japan is notably striking in the composition of the workforce and at the workplace. A simple example: the gender wage gap in Japan is twice the OECD average. In Japan, companies play an important role in the life of people, they organize and structure the entire society, the dominant force shaping the fate of women often happens to be these corporations: their rules, their management, their employees, and their union.
