Japanese women suffer widespread 'maternity harassment' at work

Almost half of Japanese women who work on short-term contracts suffer harassment after becoming pregnant or giving birth, according to a government survey.

Evidence of widespread discrimination is a blow to attempts by the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to increase the number of women in the workplace and revive the world’s third biggest economy.

Concern about the prevalence of “maternity harassment” – or matahara in Japanese – prompted the health, welfare and labour ministry to conduct its first survey of attitudes towards working women who become pregnant or take time off to have children.

The results show 48.7% of women sent to corporate clients by temp agencies encountered victimisation, ranging from dismissal and demotion to unfair treatment and verbal abuse. The survey of 3,500 women aged 24-44 found that 21.8% of full-time employees were subjected to similar mistreatment.

The number of complaints has increased in tandem with a rise in the number of Japanese women who stay in their jobs after giving birth. In 2010, 46% stayed in work after having their first child, compared with 32% in 2001, the health ministry said. The number of maternity harassment complaints has risen 18% in the past six years.

Campaigners say harassment has added to fears among women on short-term contracts that they will not be re-hired if they take maternity or childcare leave.

Abe says he wants to raise the number of women in the workforce to revive the economy, which has slid back into recession for the fifth time in seven years. Japanese women on average earn just over 70% of a man’s salary for the same work. He has also pledged to create new nursery school places to encourage more women to go back to work.

Discrimination in the workplace poses a challenge to his plans for women to fill 30% of all public and private sector leadership positions by the end of the decade.

Japan performs poorly in international gender equality comparisons. In the World Economic Forum’s 2014 global gender gap index, it ranked 104th out of 142 countries.

At 64%, Japan’s female participation rate in the labour force, compared with 84% for men, is one of the lowest among the 34 leading economies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Almost 48% of the women surveyed by the health ministry said they had been accused of “causing trouble” or were encouraged to quit their jobs after becoming pregnant. Just over a fifth were dismissed, while 17.1% had seen their bonuses reduced and 15.9% had been pressured to resign.

In most cases – almost 40% – the perpetrators were male superiors, but 20% involved discriminatory behaviour by female bosses.

Matahara Net, a group of women campaigning for an end to maternity harassment, has documented numerous examples on its website, even though dismissing or demoting employees due to pregnancy or childbirth violates Japanese employment laws.

The cases include a male employee telling his pregnant female colleague that she should quit her job, as he had instructed his own wife to do when she found out she was expecting.

Another woman said she was told not to expect to be granted maternity leave and to consider leaving the company instead.

The campaign to end maternity harassment has been given a boost by the courts, however.

Last year the supreme court ruled that demoting a woman because she is pregnant is illegal. That landmark ruling came in a case brought by a hospital physiotherapist who had been demoted after asking for a lighter workload during her pregnancy.

This week a court in Hiroshima ordered the hospital to pay the woman, who requested anonymity, 1.75m yen (£9,300) in damages.