On the historical development of regional differences in women’s participation in Japan

This study investigates the sources of regional differences in women’s participation in Japan. While it is known that the female participation rate is low in Japan, it is perhaps less known that it differs significantly across regions within the country. In particular, in the Northern Coastal region of Honshu Island, the female participation rate is much higher than elsewhere. The participation rate increased throughout the twentieth century. Historically, urban areas had low participation, whereas non-urban areas had high participation. The participation rate rose steadily and significantly in urban areas, and to a lesser extent in non-urban areas. As a result, there was a significant convergence in female participation from 1930 to 2010. The Northern Coastal region, which is a non-urban region, emerged as the region with the highest participation in the 1960s. 1 This paper uses microdata of the Employment Status Survey (ESS) made available by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication of Japan under Article 33-2 of the Statistics Act. Microdata cannot be released due to the terms of usage of the data. Part of the analysis using Census data is based on the data provided by the Center for Spatial Science, University of Tokyo. The first author thanks Ann Carlos for her generous support, encouragement, and advice. We thank participants of the 7 Cliometrics World Congress and seminar participants at Hokkaido University for helpful comments. Remaining errors are our own. This research is supported by the Japan Society for Promotion for Science Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Grant Number C-23530261). * Corresponding author: Graduate School of Economics and Business Administration, Hokkaido University, Kita 9 Nishi 7, Kita-ku, Sapporo, 060-0809 Japan. Phone 81-11-706-3860, Fax 81-11-706-4947, Email: [email protected] 2 Introduction Japan faces serious economic problems, including a declining working-age population, low fertility, and sluggish economic growth. Often-cited figures by Daly (2007) assert that GDP in Japan could be raised substantially if female labor force participation were increased. Steinberg and Nakane (2012) examine a similar issue by using cross-country data. These authors emphasize the three features of female participation in Japan: (1) an M-shaped participation profile, with participation rates declining in the age group 25–34; (2) low participation by highly educated women; and (3) a low fraction of women among managers. An additional feature that has received little recognition so far is the regional dispersion of female participation rates. In particular, areas in the Northern Coastal region of Honshu Island (Yamagata, Niigata, Toyama, Ishikawa, Fukui, Tottori, and Shimane prefectures) have very high levels of participation: in 2007, the employment-to-population ratio (E-P ratio from now on) of women aged 25–54 residing in this region was 80 percent, much higher than in Tokyo, where it was 69.3 percent. In 1982, the E-P ratio was as high as 73.9 percent in the Northern Coastal region, close to 20 percentage points higher than in Tokyo. High participation in the Northern Coastal region is even more striking because it is not due to the prevalence of part-time work, or to lower fertility. Women in this region are much more likely to work full time, marry, and have higher fertility rates than are women in other parts of Japan. Observable economic factors, such as male income, industrial structure, co-residence with grand-parents, and supply of childcare, do not fully explain cross-sectional differences in female participation and the high participation of this region in particular (Abe 2 If we consider that in 2010, the E-P ratio of females in the same age group was 82 percent in Sweden, 76.6 percent in France, 76.3 percent in Germany, 74.4 percent in the United Kingdom, and 69.3 percent in the United States (figures are from statistics published by OECD), the participation rate in the Northern Coastal region is comparable to, or higher than, the rate in the countries with high participation. 3 2013). The observed dispersion of participation rates is puzzling, given that tax and other social systems are not very different across Japanese regions, and that migration is common. Regional variation in female participation has recently attracted some attention. Fogli and Veldkamp (2011), for instance, examine the spatial correlation in participation behavior in the United States and consider the role of information transmission among women; Black, Kolesnikova, and Taylor (2013) analyze the role of differential commuting costs across major U.S. cities; Acemoglu, Autor, and Lyle (2004) and Goldin and Olivetti (2013) examine changes in women’s labor supply across U.S. states during the World War II era and thereafter. Olivetti and Petrongolo (2008) study the effect of different participation levels on the gender wage gap across European countries. Although high participation in the Northern Coastal region has already been pointed out (Abe et al. 2008; Abe 2013), little is known about the recent historical evolution of these regional differences in women’s participation in the labor market. In this paper, we use two datasets to trace this evolution over time: Census data that cover the period from 1930 to 2010, and data from the Employment Status Survey (ESS) from 1982 to 2007, which allow us to characterize participation patterns by education and marital status. Historically, urban areas had low participation, and non-urban areas had high participation. In 1930, female E-P ratio was 19 percent in Tokyo, the prefecture with the lowest participation at that time; and 72 percent in the ten prefectures with highest participation. Since then, the participation rate rose steadily and significantly in urban areas and to a lesser extent in the high-participation region. In 2010, the E-P ratio in the prefecture with lowest participation (Nara) was 62.2 percent, whereas the average in the ten prefectures with highest participation was 76.8 percent. While regional disparities in participation declined over time, the relative rank of prefectures has remained remarkably stable in the following sense: the league of regions with