Being doubly disadvantaged or escaping gender discrimination?: female self-employment in Japan and their responses to the COVID-19 crisis

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on female self-employed workers in Japan, evaluating their position in the labour market and access to social protection. It also investigates the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and their responses to it. We find that female self-employed workers are in a better position than female employees working on non-standard contracts, with less gender disparity. However, they lack social protection against sudden income loss, which caused them more serious damage during the COVID-19 crisis. Although the segment is relatively free from gender discrimination, it cannot escape the gender biases embedded in the social security system.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-employment
• social protection
• gender gap
• COVID-19
• non-standard employees

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. According to the definition in public statistics in Japan, workers are divided into employed (employees) and self-employed. ‘Self-employment’ consists of self-employed workers without employees, self-employed workers with employees, and family workers (who work for their family business without receiving wages). Whether one is self-employed or a business owner is determined if the business/organisation is registered or not. In sociological study on social mobility in Japan, ‘self-employment’ often includes owners of businesses with less than 30 employees (Ishida, 2004). This study adopts the definition in public statistics, though there is not much difference in working conditions or social protection between the two.

2. Share of the private sector in total employment (2019): Japan (83%), Germany (80%), US (79%), UK (68%), France (67%), Sweden (61%). Data can be extracted from Annual Labour Force Survey (ALFS), and Government at a Glance at OECD.Stat (https://stats.oecd.org/).

3. Social expenditure as percentage of GDP (2017): France (36%), US (30%), Sweden (30%), Germany (29%), UK (26%), Japan (25%). Above include expenditures for public social security schemes, consisting of public and private sources. Data from Social Expenditure (SOCX) at OECD.Stat.

4. Suzuki (2020) discusses the nature of the dualism in the Japanese labour market in detail by estimating the latent structure of it.

5. We calculated this value based on Basic Survey on Wage Structure, Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare. The gender wage gap in Japan was 22% in 2021 (https://www.oecd.org/tokyo/statistics/gender-wage-gap-japanese-version.htm). However, this value shows the gender wage gap that targets only standard employees. There are significant disparities between standard/non-standard employees in the Japanese labour market; it is not enough to just look at standard employees. We need to consider the gap among all employees to evaluate the gender wage gap.

6. The sample size for most social surveys is around several thousand. With self-employment accounting for about 10% of workers, the number of records for the self-employed included in a single survey is usually around a few hundreds.

7. Labour Force Survey (2021).

8. There are two different systems for worker category in Japan’s official statistics. The first is to categorise them based on the length of contract terms: ‘ordinary employees’, ‘temporary employees’, and ‘daily employees’. The second is to categorise them based on their memberships: ‘standard employees’ and ‘nonstandard employees’. Standard employees are considered full members of the company, while non-standard employees are not. Categories of ‘ordinary workers’ and ‘temporary/daily workers’ were used before 1985, and categories of ‘standard employees’ and ‘nonstandard employees’ are used after 1985.

9. Income data obtained in the Employment Status Survey are categorical. The middle value of each category is used for calculation, weighted and averaged.

10. For details of social security systems in Japan, please refer to National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (2019). The report is a through and extensive review on the topic.

11. Answers on social protection coverage are not highly reliable probably due to lack of respondents’ knowledge about the systems, and we should expect some measurement errors.

12. Data from ‘Key Short-Term Economic Indicators’ and ‘Quarterly National Accounts’ at OECD.stat.

13. Hamaguchi (2020a) and Hamaguchi (2020b) extensively discuss the Employment Adjustment Subsidy .

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences (JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research 20K13695,Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) 20H01566) and the Japan Center for Economic Research.

Notes on contributors

Kyoko Suzuki

Kyoko Suzuki is a researcher in the Department of Labour Market and Working Environment Research at the Japan Institute of Labour Policy and Training (JILPT), Tokyo, Japan. Her research examines mechanisms generating inequalities in the Japanese labour market. She employs a quantitative approach and historical analysis to study the intersection of gender, employment systems, and union activism in Japan. She also has over ten years of experience in business consulting for Japanese corporations, specializing in the area of people and organizational management.

Shuhei Naka

Shuhei Naka is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology, Meiji Gakuin University, Japan. His research interests are social stratification and mobility, inequality in work, entry into and exit from self-employment. In his current research project, he investigates what kind of working conditions modern self-employed people work under and to what extent these differ between urban and rural areas based on quantitative and qualitative methods.