Labor force participation figures
The WSJ has some interesting data on the Japanese workforce:
The labor crunch is expected to get worse in the next few years as Japan’s baby boomers start to retire. The boomers, who number about 6.7 million, were mostly born in a concentrated, three-year period between 1947 and 1949. Then, legalized abortion and birth control began to reduce the birth rate. As a result, longer term, the situation is unlikely to improve: In Japan’s aging society, its working-age population is expected to fall 15% between 2005 and 2025…
Japanese companies still have a long way to go in catching up with other nations in making full use of women workers. Even though Japan passed a law in 1986 to forbid sex discrimination in the workplace, advancement for women has been slow: Women in Japan hold only 10% of managerial posts, and Japanese companies still tend to demand that workers put in long hours if they are to be taken seriously, discouraging women who want to balance work and family life. Only 23% of women who had a job a year before having a child were employed 18 months after giving birth, according to a recent government study. It doesn’t help that Japanese men are notorious for not helping with the housework. And while women are supposed to receive equal pay under the law, in reality they earn only 67% of what men earn.
From the chart above, it appears that Japan’s labor force participation by women is lower that the other countries (Sweden, the UK and the US), around 41%. We thought it might be interesting to compare Japan’s situation with that of Saudi Arabia, particularly since only total labor force participation by women is only 23% in the Kingdom. This from the Population Reference Bureau:
Saudi Arabia has an extremely young population. Of the country’s 24 million people, 43 percent are under the age of 15…non-Saudis accounted for roughly one quarter of the population in 1999. Indeed, among women who were employed that year, only 32 percent were nationals of the country. Non-Saudi labor is especially apparent in the areas of domestic service and childrearing, according to the report…Some 67 percent of women 15 years and over are literate…
So it turns out that the labor force participation by Saudi women citizens is actually about 8% (.32 x .23), versus 41% for women in Japan, and 45-47% in Sweden, the UK and the US. (Female literacy is said to be 99% in both Japan and the Western countries versus 67% in Saudi Arabia, by the way.) We’re not sure what to make of these figures, but we note that Gaza appears to be even lower in female labor force participation than Saudi Arabia, while in Egypt the (understated?) official rate is 11%.
We don’t want to fall in the trap of the Global Warming enthusiasts in confusing correlation with causation, but it does appear to us likely that a worldview that would foster a higher literacy rate and labor force participation rate among women in the Arab world, might produce a perhaps more pacific culture than often exists there.