Women working for Japan’s top banks earn little more than half the amount of their male colleagues in a stark example of the country’s entrenched gender divide.
While Japan has a relatively high labor participation rate for women, many of the positions they occupy are part-time and have little prospect of better pay or career development. That point was reiterated Monday by Claudia Goldin, who on the same day won the Nobel Prize in economics for her research into the factors behind the pay and employment gaps between men and women, in comments picked up by Japanese media.
Female workers earned on average 54.9% of what male workers were paid at the five largest banks in the benchmark Topix index, according to their latest annual statements. The figure came to light after Japan made gender pay gap disclosure mandatory from last year.