August 13, 2025

Companies whose executives serve as top officials of the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) have little willingness to narrow wage gaps between men and women, Akahata reported on August 13.

Akahata pointed out that this was shown in data which the top tier Keidanren corporations and financial institutions recently released in regard to their gender wage gaps in 2024. Under the Act on the Promotion of Female Participation and Career Advancement in the Workplace (known as the Women’s Empowerment Act), companies with more than 301 employees are obliged to disclose their gender pay gap data.

According to Akahata, women workers at the top tier Keidanren firms in 2024 earned 67.0% of what men earned on average, which showed little change as compared with 66.6% in the previous year. Among those companies, Nippon Life Insurance Company, whose chairman is Keidanren Chairman, had the largest gender pay gap. The ratio of the wage of women to that of men was 40.7%.

As one of major barriers for the elimination of pay disparity between men and women, Akahata cited the continued use of a dual-track management system, a typical example of gender-based indirect discrimination by corporations, which includes a fast track for the management stream (career track) and a slow track for routine, clerical work (non-career track). Normally, women are hired on a non-career track.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in October 2024 recommended that Japan take measures to prevent discrimination against women in the field of employment. The UN committee’s recommendation, for example, calls for revising the Act on Equal Opportunity and Treatment between Men and Women in Employment and expanding the scope of indirect discrimination under the law.

The Japanese government should take the CEDAW recommendation seriously and fulfil its responsibility to take effective measures to narrow and eliminate the gender wage gap.