Japan Approved Female Employee Promotion Plan
The Japanese government has approved its first basic plan on empowering the country's female workforce on Friday. The female employee promotion plan will be in active from April of the coming year.
The basic plan is aiming to add about 3 million women back to the labor force by providing an environment that will allow them to balance work and role with their family. There are plenty of females who had to leave their jobs due to reasons such raising children and looking after elderly family members.
This female employee promotion plan will be working towards companies with more than 300 employees. Companies will have to check and create a report for the numbers people hired and employees working as for an administrative post. Then male to female ratio will be calculated. Companies must release the numerical goals for the number of female employee together with the action plan.
The newly approved plan for all female contains 3 main matters. The first one is for manager and administrative posts to change the awareness of long hours labor. The second one is to create a framework for females to be able to work while being able to raise their children and also to look after older family members. It allows the female to be back in work after raising children. Female are allowed to be off work for a certain period of time to care their family.
The last one is to get rid of sexism and to change the gender role consciousness. There are many cases of maternity harassments and sexual harassments in Japanese workplace and the new plan will try to fight against it. It will also promote male to help housework so that female can also work. Importance of telecommuting work- work which you can do at your home with improved of technology, can be exaggerated too.
According to research by Bizreach, 65.6% of Japanese agreed for this plan. One-third of the population are against the new plan and there are understandable reasons for that. "More female at workplace can cause low birth rate, late marriage, nuclear family" is one reason. A male worker said, "there are many other issues needed to be sorted. Male needs parental leave acquisition, reducing the number of waiting children for childhood education and the tax burden has to be done before."
News Souce: Sankei Shimbun