The Organizational Reproduction of Gender Inequality: The Equal Employment Opportunity Law and Women's Employment in Japan, 1986--2009

Gender inequality in the workplace—the greater concentration of women in the jobs lowest in pay, status, and authority—is widespread in contemporary economies. The most striking case of gender-gap persistence in post-industrial societies, however, may be Japan. During the country's spectacular post-war economic boom, women continued to be marginalized and under-represented in the core workforce, and even today earn only 50 percent of what men earn. This is all the more surprising in light of major changes in Japanese companies over the last two decades, prompted by strong economic and legal pressures, notably the passage of an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Law in the mid-1980s and its revision and extension in the late 1990s.;By examining corporate response to the EEO Law, this dissertation aims to provide a deeper understanding of the persistent gender gap in Japan. Noting the negligible improvement in women's advancement in the labor market, observers often assume that companies did not respond to the EEO Law. I show, however, based on hiring data from large companies since the passage of the law, that companies did respond to the changing legal environments—they did not simply ignore it—but in ways that enabled them to maintain the sex segregation in the workplace that the law intended to dismantle. When the law was passed, companies were faced with a challenge because the law was fundamentally in conflict with the sex-based internal labor markets (ILMs), which had been internalized during the economic boom and were believed to be a source of organizational efficiency in Japan. Companies most dependent on the sex-based ILMs resisted the legal pressure by either avoiding or defying the values of the law. When the law was first passed in 1985, organizations avoided its intention by adopting the symbolic gesture of a two-track system, which helped them comply with the law without adjusting their sex-based workforce structure. When the law was revised and toughened in 1997, Japanese companies refused to de-adopt the two-track system by creating a new non-promotional track that simply replaced the old one. As a result, Japanese companies that adopted the two-track system, although they increased hiring of women into entry -level white-collar jobs overall, decreased it into the core (promotional) track. The specific ways organizations responded to the law thus contributed to the reproduction of gender inequality after the legal intervention.