I believe that all people are equal. However, especially at a place of work, I strongly feel that there is a discrimination between men and women in Japan. I often hear that the percentage of female managers is lower than that of other developed countries. This shows that women can’t be promoted in the same way of men. Why the situation like this occur? Partly because there are many women who can’t go back to work after childbirth to raise their children, I think. There are two plans we should do to prevent women from retiring with childbirth and child care.
First, nursery attached to places to work should be established more. Recently, nursery school and kindergarten are running short and there are many women who can’t left their children during their work time and have to retire their job to care them. If a nursery attached to working place is secured for mothers who work at there, they will be never in trouble to find a nursery. Moreover, if nursery is close to the work place of mothers, it will not need time and effort to pick their children up. To establish nursery like that would have many merits for mothers, and would need less money to install them if there were available rooms in the building the same as their working place. So we should promote companies to introduce the system, I think.
Second, we should make more flexible working system for mothers. For example, flextime system, temporary part time work and so on. Most of them want to work, but they are not afford to work as full time worker. We should not corner them into resignation but esteem their intension that they want to return to work, although they can’t work in full time. We should introduce some systems to make good working environment for them. If there are many choices, they will be able to work conforming with growth stages of their children. And, they would feel less antipathy when they resume working as full time workers if they worked little by little. With the introduction of systems like that, women who finish maternity leave can come back to work easily.
From the above, we should correspond the difficulties that mothers face as we instruct those two policies. They will expand choices for mothers who want to work. If we made good environment for working mothers, more women would have less reluctance to marry and have their children, and decreasing birthrate would be alleviated. I want to be an official of Ministry of Health, Labour and Wealfare to realize the system which I mentioned above. I am convinced that we will be able to change Japanese society into gender equality society.