Paternity leave gains momentum in Japan amid government push

TOKYO – A year after revisions to Japan’s paternity leave system, the number of new fathers taking childcare leave has jumped, with one survey showing a doubling in the number of days off taken compared with 2022.

Despite having one of the world’s most generous paternity leave systems already before the revisions, the number of fathers actually making use of it has remained relatively low until now.

But the number of days that the average father took for paternity leave has risen to 23.4 according to a 2023 survey conducted by home builder Sekisui House, up from just 2.4 in 2019.

The percentage of those who have taken paternity leave has also risen to 24.4 per cent, up from 9.6 per cent four years ago.

The survey polled 9,400 people with children of elementary school age or younger.

A government push to encourage fathers to take childcare leave has been at least partially responsible for the jump.

With revisions to the childcare law in 2022, fathers can be more flexible about taking leave from work in batches in the eight weeks after their child’s birth, making the leave they were already entitled to more accessible.

From April, companies with at least 1,000 employees have also been required to disclose what percentage of their employees take paternity leave.

That has added to societal pressure on companies to let fathers take time off to care for children.

Japan’s paternity leave system, which allows up to 52 weeks of paid time off, is the second most generous among countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as at 2022.

In comparison, the United States does not have any national statutory paid paternity leave, while the average among nations in the OECD is 10.4 days.

Still, few men had been using the system because of a mixture of societal and corporate pressure.

“Employees have started to feel the change in society and corporate attitudes and have begun to feel that it’s okay to take paternity leave,” said assistant manager Akiko Matsumoto from Hitachi’s diversity and inclusion division.

In 2022, the electronics company began offering seminars to expecting employees that outline available childcare and other related systems, and introduced tools that can calculate workers’ likely net incomes during parental leaves.

Moves to improve paternity leave take-up rates have made some progress among other Japanese companies.

Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp recently said it will double the amount of company-backed leave available to male employees to 20 days, until their child turns two.

“There was also a sense within the management that reaching a take-up rate of 100 per cent when it’s only a one-day leave is pointless,” said Sumitomo diversity and inclusion manager Chisa Kobuchi.

Some companies are taking a further step in their approach.

From August, Sekisui House launched a new system that allows parents to take leave when their children are unable to go to school, or have a serious illness.

Workers can either shorten their working hours or days, or take full leave of up to two years.

Partly through government efforts to support women, the labour participation rate rose to 74.3 per cent in 2022 among working-age women.

That is 16 percentage points higher than when the childcare leave law was enacted in 1992, boosting the country’s labour market.

But while more women work, they still shoulder the bulk of housework and childcare in the country.

The amount of time Japanese women spend doing housework and childcare is more than fivefold the time spent by men, according to OECD data.

That is far above the 1.9 times average, and underscores how far the country remains to a more balanced division of labour.

Daiwa Institute of Research researcher Shungo Koreeda said that a culture of long work hours at Japanese companies also needs to be revised.

Without a change in the environment that allows the men to more effectively be part of childcare even after their leave is over, meaningful change may be difficult to come by.

Among couples with one child where the husband does not help with housework and childcare at all on his days off, only a third have a second child, according to a Health Ministry report published in 2022.

That ratio goes up to more than 80 per cent when husbands spend more than six hours on housework and childcare.

Those figures suggest that resolving Japan’s lack of gender balance in work and care provision may hold the key to solving the country’s population crisis.

BLOOMBERG