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Gender, Work and Organization. Vol. 20 No. 5 September 2013

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2012.00599.x

Long Working Hours and the Corporate

Gender Divide in Japan gwao_599 512..527

Kumiko Nemoto*

While the workplace custom of working long hours has been known to exacerbate gender
inequality, few have investigated the organizational mechanisms by which long working hours
translate into and reinforce the power and status differences between men and women in the
workplace. Drawing on 64 in-depth interviews with workers at financial and cosmetics companies
in Japan, this article examines three circumstances in which a culture of long working hours is
disadvantageous for women workers, and the consequences of those circumstances: (a) managers
in Japanese firms, reinforcing gender stereotypes, prioritize work over personal and family lives;
(b) non–career-track women experience depressed aspirations in relation to long working hours
and young women express a wish to opt out due to the incompatibility of work with family life;
and (c) workers who are mothers deal with extra unpaid family work, stress such as guilt from
leaving work early, salary reduction and concerns over their limited chances for promotion. The
article argues that the norm of working long hours not only exacerbates the structural inequality
of gender but also shapes employed women’s career paths into the dichotomized patterns of either
emulating workplace masculinity or opting out.

Keywords: long working hours, gender inequality, organization, Japan

Introduction

T he cultural belief in separate spheres calls for a gendered division of labour in both private and
public areas of our lives, with men devoted to work and women committed to being caretakers
of their families. Whereas an employed man is expected to be an ideal worker who does not let family
or other commitments interfere with his job performance (Gambles et al., 2006, p. 57), an employed
woman is expected to fulfil dual roles as a caretaker and an ideal worker. This asymmetry in the time
men and women devote to work and family has drawn significant scholarly attention and working
long hours have been much discussed in this context of gender imbalance with regard to work and
family, as they intensify the difficulty employed women have in balancing their dual responsibilities
as workers and caretakers.
Previous studies have shown a few ways in which employed women accommodate to (or fail to
accommodate to) paid jobs that require balancing long working hours with family lives. For example,
in the UK construction industry, combining family and work is often not a viable option for women
civil engineers, especially if they wish to ascend in the promotional hierarchy (Watts, 2009). In another
study, women managers in a bank in the UK viewed motherhood as ‘the end of their career’ and saw
childlessness as synonymous with promotion (Liff and Ward, 2001, p. 26). According to another study,
when a woman manager in a utility firm in France wished to combine work and family she could
succeed only with intense time management and a highly co-operative spouse (Guillaume and
Pochic, 2009). In a study of high-achieving professional women in the USA, women who asked to

Address for correspondence: *Department of Sociology, Western Kentucky University, 1906 College Heights Blvd., Bowling Green,
KY 42101–3576, USA; e-mail: kumiko.nemoto@wku.edu

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

LONG HOURS AND THE CORPORATE GENDER DIVIDE IN JAPAN 513

move to a part-time shift were still expected to work long hours, and their aversion to the part-time
shift work, combined with their belief in intense mothering, led them to opt out (Stone, 2007a).
Furthermore, in a study of professional dual-earner couples in the USA, women who had a spouse
who worked long hours were more likely to quit their own jobs; typically, they quit because of a lack
of spousal support and a belief in the ideal image of motherhood (Cha, 2010, p. 313). Cha (2010, p. 325)
argues that her study of working long hours reveals a double set of obstacles that professional women
face: the counter-egalitarian gendered workplace and gendered family interests.
While these studies indicate that working long hours intensifies women’s time constraints and
limits their career prospects with the double burdens of work and family, very few studies have
specifically examined the organizational processes by which and contexts in which the custom of
working long hours translates into gender inequality and segregation in the workplace. Employing a
gendered organizational perspective, this article examines how working long hours bolsters work-
place masculinity, translates into a belief in gender division and legitimizes existing gender barriers
in Japanese firms, while it polarizes employed women’s aspirations and career prospects into the
patterns of either emulating workplace masculinity or opting out. The article extends previous
research about how long working hours exacerbate gender inequality in the labour market and
discusses how the structure of gender inequality intersects with workplace culture. It draws on
in-depth interviews with 64 workers, including both managers and non-managers, in five Japanese
companies and explores the impacts of the culture of long working hours on gender stereotypes,
career prospects and aspirations, and the accommodation of private lives.
Japan’s longer working hours, when compared to those of the USA and UK, made it a target of
criticism from the 1970s to the 1990s. The International Labour Organization has addressed the
problem of karoshi (death by overwork) in Japan as a human rights and labour rights matter (Kato,
1994a), but unpaid and unreported overwork continue to be rampant in Japan. Japan also remains one
of the least gender-equal countries in the world (United Nations Development Programme, 2007).
This article provides insight into the theoretical and empirical links between the long working hours
culture and organizational gender segregation in Japanese firms.
The article is structured as follows. The first section provides a review of previous arguments on
how the practice of working long hours shapes beliefs and the practices of gender, including
stereotypes against women, and how it influences women workers’ aspirations and career paths.
Following this is an explanation of the historical role of working long hours in Japan. Next, there is
a discussion of the literature on gendered inequality in employment, including the current policy on
women’s employment and childcare. The main part of the article examines the empirical link
between gender and the long working hours’ norm in these firms. The final section discusses the
implications of the findings for the long working hours’ norm and the consequences of gender
inequality, with a specific emphasis on changes to the Japanese employment system and women’s
employment in Japan.

Working long hours and gendered organization

The ideology of the separate spheres legitimizes the existing workplace gender structure by recreat-
ing ‘the gendered divide between paid work and unpaid family reproductive work, consigning the
latter, and women, to a subordinated and devalued position’ (Acker, 1998, p. 197). In this way, the
separate sphere assumption legitimizes workplace power differences between men and women and
promotes customs and practices of masculinity that are associated with the male work norm.
Workers’ exhibition of aggressiveness, competitiveness, authoritarian and profit-driven or
promotion-driven attitudes, homosocial alliances among men and negative stereotypes against
women (Collinson and Hearn, 1994; Kerfoot and Knights, 1998) are often discussed as aspects of
workplace masculinity. Working long hours, seen as a critical element of the ideal worker image, also
serves as a way to draw boundaries and encourage masculine behaviour.
The long hours’ work norm, intensifying workers’ competition and stress, promotes a ‘remascu-
linization of management’, in which women managers will survive only if they follow the male work

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514 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

norm of time discipline, by which they subordinate home and family to the company and work
(Collinson and Collinson, 2004, p. 240). Working long hours is an informal form of workplace
discipline and a major management policy on leadership; it is also a tool used to assess and control
workers’ ability to perform their jobs (Collinson and Collinson, 2004, pp. 236–7). Working long hours
is ‘a way of constructing a heroic reputation’, since sacrificing one’s time for work represents ‘com-
mitment, endurance, and toughness’ and thus provides one with confirmation of masculine identity
(pp. 230–1). A senior manager often fosters the reputation of a ‘super-human workaholic, willing and
able to accommodate enormous workloads’ (Liff and Ward, 2001, p. 30). Such individuals might not
take time off even in the case of illness, because they would see it as a sign of ‘weakness’ (Collinson
and Collinson, 2004, p. 233). Working long hours is a type of ‘boundary heightening’ behaviour
(Kanter, 1977, p. 221), in which workers identify overwork as a sign of commitment and power.
The culture of long working hours reinforces negative stereotypes against those who do not show
complete devotion or those who are primarily seen as caretakers rather than ideal workers. A woman
who wishes to combine the caretaker role with her work may face a ‘motherhood penalty’ or negative
stereotyping for being less than competent and committed to paid work (Correll et al., 2007). One
study showed that for women managers in a bank, ‘motherhood would spell the end of their career’,
and promotion is synonymous with childlessness (Liff and Ward, 2001, pp. 26–7). Women managers’
childlessness is so common that family-friendly or life–work balance policies have not been effective
in reversing the trend (Wood and Newton, 2006, p. 339). In one study of civil engineers it was noted
that a pregnant woman was removed from a decision-making position and faced a promotion penalty
(Watts, 2009, p. 49). For a worker who is a mother, family-orientation attitudes can be interpreted as
‘explicit withdrawal from the competition for power’ (Guillaume and Pochic, 2009, p. 33): in contrast,
men’s career opportunities are not constrained by fatherhood (Hochschild, 1997; Lyon and
Woodward, 2004; Watts, 2009). Those women who take childcare leave are mostly non-managerial
women not upper-level managers (Fried, 1998, p. 41). In order to avoid the sanctions associated with
motherhood and to stay on a masculine career path, young women choose to postpone maternity
(Guillaume and Pochic, 2009, p. 29). Yet women who make it to the top by emulating masculinity also
face other negative stereotypes, such as having ‘lost their femininity’ or being ‘cut-throat, thrusting
and ruthless’ (Liff and Ward, 2001, pp. 25–6).
As seen in the two negative stereotypes of women as either career-oriented or family-oriented, the
workplace culture of overwork polarizes women’s career prospects and paths, forcing them to choose
between emulating masculinity or opting out. Among dual-earner professional couples, spousal
overwork increases a woman’s likelihood of quitting her job (Cha, 2010). In a study of professional
women who quit their jobs to become homemakers, Stone (2007b, p. 18) writes, ‘That work and family
were incompatible was the overwhelming message [women] took from their experiences’. Even with
the post-Fordist organizational shifts, in which working hours’ flexibility and autonomy are increas-
ingly common, overwork remains the norm in many places and ‘women still opt for having kids and
raising families’ over work (Van Echtelt et al., 2009, p. 208).
The long working hour norm influences women’s and men’s promotion aspirations differently.
Kanter (1977, p. 140) famously argues that a worker exhibits ‘depressed aspirations’ and a low work
commitment when placed in a position with limited opportunities and resources. In other words,
‘blocked mobility breeds pessimism and disengagement among workers’ (Cassirer and Reskin, 2000,
p. 458). Gerson’s study (1985) reports that women’s blocked opportunities lead them to choose
domesticity over work. Developing Kanter’s argument, Cassirer and Reskin (2000, p. 458), argue that
men’s longer working hours exacerbate the gender gap in men’s and women’s promotion aspirations.
Men’s longer working hours may derive from the greater rewards men get from work but it may also
be that long working hours increase women’s pessimism about their low status.

Long working hours in a Japanese context

Japanese workers have historically worked longer hours than workers in many OECD countries
(Kato, 1994a; Kawanishi, 2008; West, 2003). In 1988 annual working hours were about 1,960 hours in

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LONG HOURS AND THE CORPORATE GENDER DIVIDE IN JAPAN 515

the USA, 1,950 hours in the UK, 1,620 hours in Germany and 2,190 in Japan (Ministry of Health,
Labour and Welfare, 2005a). Due to international pressure, Japan’s annual working hours in 1998 had
dropped to 1,950 and, by 2006 had dropped further to 1,784 hours — fewer than the 1,797 hours
worked in the USA (OECD, 2008). However, official statistics do not reflect the reality for ordinary
Japanese workers (Kato, 1994a). The statistics conceal a large amount of unpaid ‘service’ overtime,
common in Japanese companies: this can reach up to one hundred hours per month (Kato, 1994a;
1994b; Kawanishi, 2008). The overall average also fails to reflect the long hours of full-time workers,
as the data include the hours worked by large numbers of part-time female workers (Kato, 1994a).
Japan’s full-time work day is 8-hours long. In 2006 over 60 per cent of workers worked more than
10 hours daily, and one in three male workers in their twenties, thirties and forties worked about 12
hours per day (Research Institute for Advancement of Living Standards, 2006). The same data also
report that 40 per cent of workers were not compensated for their overtime. In addition to their actual
working hours, employed male workers reported a national average daily commute to work of 1 hour
and 16 minutes; employed women reported a commute 58 minutes (Ministry of Internal Affairs and
Communications, 2006). In 2004, while full-time workers in Japan were given 18 vacation days on
average per year, they took only 8.4 days off (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2006).
Incidents of karoshi and karo-jisatsu (suicide because of overwork) remain common in Japan, even
though the government has officially acknowledged (but only in some cases) that companies are
responsible for this overwork and since the 1990s has required companies to compensate the families
of victims (Kanai, 2009). It is estimated that more than ten thousand workers still die annually due to
cerebral or cardiac disease caused by work overload in Japan (Kawahito, 1998).
Historically, with the rise of the modern Japanese state in the 19th century, the custom of long
working hours was instilled in the minds of the Japanese public as an aspect of nationalism (Kato,
1994a, 1994b). The Meiji state in the 19th century mandated long working hours, using slogans like
‘Catch up with and surpass the western counterparts’ and ‘Enrich the country, strengthen the
military’. Before World War II Japanese employees worked close to 3,300 hours a year (West, 2003, p.
6); it was only after 1947, when the USA forced the Standard Labour Law upon the Japanese, that
Japan’s average went down to 2,000 hours per year (Kato, 1994b). Since the postwar period a strong
nationalist sentiment for economic development has dominated the Japanese public and private
discourse of work. The chief of the Ministry of Labour expressed his ambivalence about the working
hours’ reduction initiative of 1992 by referring to Kinjiro Ninomiya, a national legend of the 19th
century in modern Japan, whose hard work through ‘selfless servitude to the state’ (messhi houkou)
allowed him, formerly a poor peasant, to become a wealthy landowner (Kato, 1994b). A selfless and
devoted attitude to work remains integral to the practice of overwork in Japan.

The gendered structure of work and family in Japan

While 80 per cent of male workers work full time in Japan, only 45 per cent of all employed women
do (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 2007). When women work full time they are
largely concentrated on the lower rungs of the organizational hierarchy. In the USA and the UK
women constitute 43 per cent and 35 per cent of managers, respectively, but they make up only about
10 per cent in Japan (Cabinet Office, 2012).
Large firms in Japan often rely on the Japanese style of management, which has been characterized
by lifelong employment, seniority promotion and benefits for the family, including housing. Promo-
tion in large Japanese firms is mostly based on seniority. The worker is usually evaluated and ranked
by one or two middle-level managers. While many Japanese firms in the 1990s introduced western-
style ‘performance’ or ‘productivity’ based evaluation, its impact has been limited (Keizer, 2009).
In 2001 67 per cent of full-time and part-time employed women quit their jobs upon childbirth
(Cabinet Office, 2009). Among these women, 33 per cent stated that they did not think that child-
rearing was compatible with their jobs, and 23 per cent stated that long working hours coupled with
a long daily commute would make it too difficult to combine work and raising a family (White paper
on the national lifestyle, 2006).

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516 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

In addition to women leaving their jobs, past studies (Brinton, 1989; Shire, 2000) pointed to
double-track hiring as a major obstacle to women’s upward mobility because it pushes a large
number of women into assistant-level clerical positions with few opportunities for promotion or
good benefits. Almost all men with a college degree are hired as career-track workers; only a handful
of women with the same education are given the same opportunity. In 2005, among the career-track
workers who were hired by large firms (those with over 5,000 employees), women made up only
about 12 per cent of all the career-track workers who were hired; for the firms with about 1,000 to
5,000 employees, women made up 11 per cent of all the career-track hires (Ministry of Health, Labour
and Welfare, 2005b). Although sex-discrimination lawsuits against the track-hiring system have been
filed in the past, the practice remains common. The courts have claimed that career-track hiring is
legal because employers’ use of this system often started prior to the Equal Employment Opportunity
Law (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 1999), and they also have argued that the hiring system
in some firms allowed non–career-track women to change to the career-track path (Tsujimura, 2007).
Japanese laws have been ineffective at improving women’s low employment status. The 1985 Equal
Employment Opportunity Law, until the 1997 revision, did not strictly prohibit discrimination with
regard to recruitment, hiring, assignments and promotions; it only required employers to make a
good-faith effort in these areas (Yamakawa, 1999). And, far from improving the law, the 1997 revision
abolished the protective provisions that restricted women from performing overtime and late-night
work (Geraghty, 2008, p. 516; Shire and Imai, 2000, p. 13); this, coupled with the liberalization of
temporary employment, further exacerbated the poor working conditions for a large number of
temporary women workers (Shire, 2002). The 2006 revised EEOL (Ministry of Health, Labour and
Welfare, 2007) still lacks punitive measures, including heavy fines or criminal sanctions, for compa-
nies’ sex discrimination (Geraghty, 2008; Starich, 2007).
Previous studies on organizational gender inequality have found much evidence of discrimina-
tion and marginalization of women workers in Japanese firms. In an ethnographic study of bank
employees (Ogasawara, 1998, p. 12), non–career-track women workers were seen as ‘less wedded
to the company; they regard authority lightly’, and also as accepting of short-term careers,
boredom in their assigned jobs, lack of opportunity and the expectation that they would quit upon
marriage. Some would argue that Japanese firms’ explicit relegation of women to assistant status
reflects educational differences. A study of retail firms and general merchandise stores at which
college graduates made up only 8 per cent of the women in the workplace at the time of the
interviews, and where ‘men join the company under a system of long working hours and appear
to have a sense from the outset of “carrying the workplace on their shoulders” ’ (Kimoto, 2005,
p. 103), revealed that most women were assigned to assistant jobs and felt boredom and a sense of
futility (Kimoto, 2005, pp. 85–8).
However, the percentage of women attending 4-year colleges or universities soared from 15 to
44 per cent between 1990 and 2009, while the percentage of men increased only from 33 to
56 per cent (Cabinet Office, 2010). The number of college graduates among newly hired women
workers increased from around 14 to 55 per cent between 1989 and 2008, while the percentage of
women workers among the newly hired workers who are only high school graduates went from 55
per cent down to 27 per cent during the same years (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare,
2008a).
A high level of national concern regarding population decline and the shrinking future labour
force in Japan has led policymakers to improve parental leave for workers who are mothers. Under
the recent revisions to the Child Care and Family Care Leave Law (Ministry of Health, Labour and
Welfare, 2005c), workers are entitled to a year’s leave that can be extended to up to 1.5 years, and the
leave is available to both sexes (Geraghty, 2008, pp. 521–2). Workers can be paid up to 40 per cent of
previous earnings from employment insurance, and the employee can ask for a limit on overtime
work and an exemption from night work (Geraghty, 2008, pp. 521–2). The availability and length of
childcare leave that private firms offer vary depending on the firm size (Roberts, 2005), with public or
government-related institutions offering the longest childcare leave (3 years). However, in 2007, 90
per cent of the working women who gave birth in Japan in the previous year took childcare leave,

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LONG HOURS AND THE CORPORATE GENDER DIVIDE IN JAPAN 517

while only 1.6 per cent of working men whose spouse gave birth in the previous year did (Ministry
of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2008b). Caretaking work remains almost entirely the responsibility of
women and the availability of childcare facilities is inadequate. Workers who are mothers and who
work long hours often rely on their parents’ help to take care of their children (Roberts, 2005).

Methods

This article relies on the data collected for a large study of gender and workplace culture in five
companies in Japan. Using a snowball sampling method, I conducted 64 in-depth interviews in 2007
with a diverse group of workers in Tokyo, employed at three financial and two cosmetics companies
(see Table 1). I had contacted university faculty and alumni members at a few universities in Tokyo,
informing them of my research plan involving cosmetics and financial firms and was introduced by
them to my initial contacts in each firm.
I initially chose five companies in two industries that are distinctly different in terms of the gender
composition of career-track workers, gendered hiring practices and public image. The two cosmetics
companies employed a much higher number of career-track women workers than the financial
companies did and did not use double-track hiring. The cosmetics industry is also seen as one of the
most women-friendly in Japan, whereas the image of financial companies is traditional and highly
patriarchal. However, I found that women upper managers were almost absent in all the firms. In
addition, there were more similarities than differences among the firms with regard to male-
dominated organizational customs and practices.
I interviewed 39 women and 25 men (see Table 2). All the men were career-track workers. In total
29 of the women were career-track workers; nine worked as non–career-track workers and one was
a contract worker. Among the 25 men, 20 were married, 16 had stay-at-home wives and three had a
wife who worked only part time, while only one man’s wife worked full time. Among the 39 women
I interviewed, 16 were married. Among the 21 women who worked in financial firms, three had
children, while among the 18 women who worked in cosmetics firms, six had children. The average
age of the women was 34 years and the average age of the men was 39.

Table 1: Summary of Organizations

Financial Cosmetics

Daigo Life Shijo Asset

Companies Insurance Management Mikado Bank Hanakage Takane

The number of 8 8 5 9 9
female workers
interviewed
The number of 6 4 4 5 6
male workers
interviewed
Female managers 7% Less than 2% 20% 6% 14%
The ratio of 1:1 7:3 1:1 1:1 1:1.5
employees
(Male : Female)
Hiring divisions Career-track/ Career-track/ Abolished in No Career-track/
area-career-track/ area-career-track early 2000 area-career-
non-career-track track

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518 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

Table 2: Men and women interviewed

Women Men

N = 39 % N = 25 %

1. Employment status
Career-track worker 29 74 25 100
Non-career-track worker 9 23 0 0
Contract worker 1 3 0 0
2. Age
20–29 12 31 2 8
30–39 20 51 11 44
40–49 6 15 11 44
50–59 1 3 1 4
3. Marital status
Single 23 59 5 20
Married 16 41 20 80
Married with stay-at-home spouse 16 64
4. Education
High school graduate 1 3 0 0
Two-year college graduate 6 15 0 0
College graduate 28 72 22 88
Graduate degree 4 10 3 12

I personally conducted all the interviews in Japanese, mostly in coffee shops or offices. The office
door was closed so that other workers did not hear the interviews. I recorded the interviews and
transcribed them for analysis, then translated them into English. Each interview lasted from 1 to 3
hours. I used pseudonyms for the names of the companies and the individuals. The interviews were
semi-structured. Using Acker’s concept of the gendered organization structure (1990, 1998) as a
guideline, I asked each individual about the workplace culture and their individual experiences,
including training, career prospects, workplace interactions, working hours and work–life balance.
For this article, I read the data closely and analysed the parts on working hours.
Daigo Life Insurance Company has about 8,000 employees and over 30,000 sales employees across
Japan. They have long used career-track hiring, and non–career-track women are able to change to the
career track, usually with several years of work experience, a certain number of months of insurance
sales experience, the successful completion of exams and the recommendations of their managers.
Until very recently the company had an internal policy of forcing women to resign upon marriage.
Women now constitute 7 per cent of managers. The firm offers up to 3 years of childcare leave with 1
month paid. Workers can reduce their work time by 1 hour a day until the child reaches 3 years of age.
Shijo Asset Management has about 700 employees and belongs to the large Shijo Financial Group,
which employs over 10,000 workers across Japan. About 70 per cent of the employees are men. The
company uses career-track hiring, even though they recently changed the name of ‘non-career track’
to ‘regional track’ so that all women were officially called ‘career-track’ workers. Non–career-track
women are able to change to career-track positions. Shijo offers up to 2 years of childcare leave.
Workers can reduce their work time by up to 2 hours a day until a child reaches 9 years of age. At
Shijo, women constitute about 2 per cent of managers.
Mikado Bank has about 2,300 employees, half of whom are women. It offers up to 2 years of
childcare leave. The bank abolished career-track hiring in early 2000 after an American company took
over the firm. Women make up 20 per cent of managers.
Hanakage has about 11,000 employees. There is no division between career track and non-career
track. Women constituted about 6 per cent of managers in 2005. The firm offers 1 year of childcare
leave. Until the child is 3 years old, workers can reduce their daily work time by up to 2 hours.

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LONG HOURS AND THE CORPORATE GENDER DIVIDE IN JAPAN 519

Takane has about 3,000 employees and 7,000 sales specialists (mostly women) across Japan. Almost
all the college-educated women Takane hires are brought in as career-track workers. Women make up
about 14 per cent of managers. Takane offers up to a 5-year childcare leave. Workers can reduce work
time by up to 2 hours per day until the child reaches 9 years of age.
The sample I used is too small to make a thorough generalization about all Japanese firms, but it
provides critical insights into the organizational processes by which working long hours influence
existing gender inequality in Japanese firms. I oversampled women so that I could focus on their
experiences. My being a female Japanese researcher certainly made women respondents more com-
fortable than men about talking with me. While the article examined the large patterns of gender that
have emerged from the 64 interviews, the quotes that are used in the findings section did not
necessarily reflect all the respondents’ views, as some of them expressed views that differ from the
three patterns I discuss in the findings.

Findings
Masculinity as a management imperative
The workers at Mikado Bank whom I interviewed told me that they left the company at around 8 pm
most days, while workers in the investment banking and mergers and acquisitions divisions stayed
past 10 pm daily. Eiji, a 38-year-old manager, would leave the company after midnight daily and come
back to work at 9 am every morning, often paying for the commute by taxi out of his own pocket.
Asked about his recent hospitalization and surgery, he said that it was not a big deal:
An investment banker who works like me usually gets hospitalized at least once by the age of
forty.... People should be able to function with a couple hours of sleep.
Most of the men in their thirties and forties that I interviewed reported that they had often worked
until after midnight in the years prior to the interview. Five male managers in their thirties and forties
in financial companies reported undergoing long-term medical treatment due to health problems,
including gastrointestinal problems and severe depression:
There is nobody who goes home at 6 pm in my department. I say to my buka [subordinate workers],
‘You’ve got to be kidding me! Why do you leave at 5 or 6? What kind of work did you do? Idiots’.
I know that the company was forced to close the building early just recently. I often hear stupid
comments from some workers such as, ‘I can work more effectively when I leave early’. I tell them,
‘If you work effectively during the day, you can also work effectively in the evening’. You know
what I mean?
As Kerfoot and Knights (1998, p. 16) write, ‘Masculinity involves the attachment to an instrumental
achievement of identity through the control of self and other’. Eiji aggressively insists on working
long hours as a form of discipline to manage himself and his subordinates. He draws the masculine
boundary by stereotyping women managers as not working long hours. He said, ‘I am sure women
with children can do 9-to-5 type jobs. Some of them might even attain the title of manager’. However,
he added, ‘Those titles the women managers obtain often have nothing to do with actual manage-
ment’. By actual management, he meant such tasks as managing subordinates and maneuvering
client/worker networks in and outside of the company.
He responded dismissively to my question about female employees emerging as an increasing
force in the company, secure in his belief that women do not and cannot work like most men do:
Promoting women is risky because they may quit the job if they have children. If women leave early,
it is men who do the rest of the work and make money for them.... Women cannot go to settai
[business entertainment] alone late in the evening. A man can go alone. The cost is half. You have
to treat the clients from your own pocket all the time. You must pay yourself, to get the business
done.... Those who really contribute to the company need to sacrifice themselves in many ways,

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520 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

such as working long hours and paying as necessary. As far as I know, I have never met a woman
who works like me.
In Eiji’s view, a woman is not an ideal worker because she is neither able to work long hours nor serve
the company by sacrificing her personal life for it.
At Daigo Life Insurance, there were no career-track women with children. Tami, a 38-year-old
female middle manager at Daigo Life Insurance, insisted that working long hours is necessary for the
firm:
I think it is silly that the media sells the image of ‘women-friendly’ companies ... so some recently
hired career-track women have a false sense of entitlement about being able to have both.... You can
do some deskwork or computer work, not a problem. But if you are a branch manager, you have
to do sales work with clients after 8 or 9. Also, you might have to deal with sales members who
want to talk with you after work. You need to be there for them.... I do not think you can have both
a job and a family perfectly. It is just impossible.
Almost all the managers I interviewed saw prioritizing work over their personal lives as necessary.
For women this often means remaining single (Liff and Ward, 2001). The women managers may
postpone childbearing until they establish their position of authority in the organizational hierarchy
(Liff and Ward, 2001). Yuka, a 38-year-old female manager of the securities section at Mikado Bank,
had lived with her parents all her life:
I used to work until 1 or 2, sometimes 3 in the morning. Once the stock market opens in other
countries, and it is almost midnight here in Tokyo, it is just hard to leave work.
She had postponed marriage to her boyfriend of over 10 years, who is also a corporate worker. ‘I am
not sure if I will be able to maintain a marriage with this job’, said Yuka.
A woman’s choice of family over work might not uncommonly result from exhaustion over
masculine competition. Maki, a 39-year-old manager at Mikado Bank, worked until after midnight
daily in her twenties and reached a mid-managerial position in her mid-thirties:
I felt I had reached the limitations of my career. It is just that I felt I could not compete with younger,
talented men any more. This drove me in the direction of having a child and a family.
Keiko, a 37-year-old manager at Shijo Asset Management, continued to work late even after having
children to ascend further in the hierarchy:
I am so glad that I was just promoted to be section chief. I deserved this. I have worked so hard. I
never went home early, any single day. I did 70 hours of overtime every month during my
pregnancy.... I have never seen any woman at work who had a child before. So I thought I should
just keep pushing myself and work as much as I could.
She was often warned by her doctor about the high risk of premature birth. When she took her year
of childcare leave, a couple of male managers expressed their disapproval by ignoring her e-mails and
phone calls.
A long working hours’ schedule intensifies the separation between work and family, emphasizes
masculine competence and normalizes workplace gender stereotypes of women as not being com-
petent and capable. Managers are expected to spend little time on their personal and family lives:
male managers ignore their health problems and family and women managers learn that they can
only take time out for marriage and reproduction after they resign. Both men and women managers
in Japanese firms did not hesitate, during the interviews, to reinforce traditional gender stereotypes
in which women who prioritize things other than work are less committed and competent, thus
normalizing the authority of men who spend long hours at work.

Blocked opportunities and women’s options

All the non–career-track workers at Daigo Life Insurance whom I interviewed said they had no
intention of moving up the career-track ladder even though many have the same educational

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LONG HOURS AND THE CORPORATE GENDER DIVIDE IN JAPAN 521

background as career-track employees. Mari, 27-year-old non–career-track worker, said, ‘None of

the non–career-track women wants to change to the career track. We want to leave work early’.
Non–career-track workers leave firms around 7 pm while career-track workers leave at 9 pm or
later. Sachiko, a 36-year-old non–career-track worker, said, ‘If you are a career-track woman, you
have to work like a man’. For her and most non–career-track women, working like a man means
enduring long hours and fulfilling frequent after-work drinking obligations that may last until
close to midnight. They are also concerned about having health problems as a result of working
long hours.
Women’s lack of interest in working long hours reinforces the workplace belief that those who fail
to work long hours regularly should remain in lower positions. A 42-year-old male manager noted:
I often encourage these non–career-track women to change to the career track. But they say they
want to go home at 5 pm and want to spend time on themselves rather than working.
He implied that non–career-track women’s aversion to overtime stems from their lack of ambition
and commitment, indicating that they deserve a low status in the company. In addition to committing
to working long hours, women who hope to advance would normally have to take a few exams and
accumulate several years of experience before they could change to career-track positions. These
requirements discourage many women from taking this step.
At the time of the interviews, few non–career-track women workers at Daigo Life Insurance
planned to quit their jobs upon childbirth, and this may be because they did not have to work hours
as long as those of career-track workers. However, non–career-track women at Shijo Asset Manage-
ment who worked long hours wished to leave their jobs upon marriage. It may be that it is not simply
the non–career-track system per se that makes women want to quit their jobs but also the fact that their
having worked long hours negatively influenced their aspirations and future prospects.
Saki, a 31-year-old regional career-track employee in sales at Shijo Asset Management, has a hard
time feeling hopeful about her career. During our interview she mentioned that her most viable
option is marriage and opting out of work. Saki makes daily trips to branches of the parent firm, Shijo
Securities, all over the country. While she works past 10 pm nearly every day, and often after
midnight, she is paid only the equivalent of US$20 for each trip, with no overtime payment:
Right now, I sleep at most about 5 hours every day. I try to sleep on the trains. On weekends, I just
sleep and play games in my room. There is no time left to do or think about anything else.
The women workers’ perceptions, combined with managers’ perceptions as well as the practice of
gender-segregated hiring, makes it still more difficult for women to break out of this system of
blocked opportunities.
Cosmetics companies are known as women-friendly workplaces, and most women whom I
interviewed in the cosmetics companies worked in career-track positions. Married women and
women with children were visible. However, five out of ten single women workers whom I inter-
viewed at the two cosmetics firms (more so at Hanakage than at Takane) foresaw that their careers
would be incompatible with future family plans. None of the young women at Hanakage felt they
could continue to work in their current department after marriage and childbirth. For example, a
29-year-old worker, Yuri, who worked in the marketing department at Hanakage, usually stayed at
work until 9 pm or 10 pm every day. Living with her parents made it easier for her to focus on her job.
Still, she found it difficult to go out with friends after work:
We have meetings all the time after 5.30. But I never tell this to my friends. I cannot even say to them
that I work until after 10 pm. I just tell them I am busy. I am about to do things with my parents or
something. If I told them the truth, they would think I am just too career-oriented and unfriendly.
My male friends would think I am not very womanly.
Yuri was adamant about quitting her job if she marries: ‘I don’t mind quitting the company. I am not
career-oriented. I want to take care of my family’. Even though she attributed her desire to leave her
job to a lack of interest in a career and a strong belief in traditional femininity, the structural rigidity

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522 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

of the long hours ultimately reinforced her decision to quit. Moreover, the absence of female role
models in senior positions who combine successful careers with family or fulfilling personal lives also
sends a message to young workers such as Yuri. She continued:
In my department of over 60 male and about 60 female workers, over 90 per cent of the men are
married. Less than half of the women are married.... Even if you are single, if you are a woman, you
have to work really hard to get promoted, and there will be no time for family and children. I do
not want that.
When I asked the women at Hanakage and Takane if they felt their options were limited, they
responded that men’s options are far more limited, so they should not complain; in fact, they felt sorry
for the male workers. ‘Men do not have any option but to work long hours every day for the rest of
their lives. Men’s lives are much harder’, said Megumi, a 33-year-old worker at Hanakage, referring
to the strong cultural belief in the male breadwinner role. Quite a few of the female employees said
that they appreciate having the option, however limiting, to ‘quit working upon marriage or child-
birth’ — an option not given to men. The female employees seemed to accept the fact that women
hold less power in the corporate structure because of men’s larger responsibilities and obligations,
including working long hours. There seems to be a general consensus that the masculine work norm
harms male workers by depriving them of personal and family time, as well as their health. As
Ogasawara (1998, p. 12) notes, some women I interviewed seemed to feel they were less obligated
than men to devote themselves to their work or their company, and their lack of equal opportunity
was not, to them, a central concern.
The norm of working long hours decreases the aspirations of non–career-track workers, legitimiz-
ing both their blocked opportunities and the hiring track system in Japanese firms. The long working
hours norm also increases young career-track women’s pessimism about their possible choices and
about the likelihood that they will successfully combine work and personal and family life, and
promotes opting out as an attractive choice. Furthermore, some women I interviewed saw the option
of choosing the private sphere as a gendered privilege. Thus, women accept male workers’ position
of power over them and the existing system of gender inequality in the workplace. The ideology of
the separate spheres emerges as the justification for women’s low status and their tendency to opt out,
obscures the institutional mechanism of gender inequality and diminishes women workers’ own
sense of structural unfairness, displacing it with a sense of sympathy towards male workers.

Divide between mothers and fathers

Takane offers a 2-week paid childcare leave to fathers but the workers said they had seen very few
men who actually take it. A 41-year-old male worker at Hanakage also said, ‘I never heard of any man
who took such a leave. I don’t understand why a man would need to take it, either’. Only one man
among those whom I interviewed had taken childcare leave. Masao, a 29-year-old male worker at
Daigo Insurance, was the first man in the company to take a parental leave:
If one man takes childcare leave in a firm, the Japanese government approves the firm as being
family-friendly and adds it to the list of family-friendly companies. The company needed one man.
I had to sacrifice myself. It was just for the image of the firm. It might be better for the profits of the
firm.... Nobody wants to take such leave. When you take childcare leave, you get a 3.3 per cent
reduction in your salary.
Masao said, ‘I think the leave is useless for men’. The male workers did not believe that their firms
encouraged men to share in childcare, especially as the childcare leave involves a salary reduction.
In contrast to the men who were indifferent to childcare, workers who are mothers were often
described by other workers as ‘being short of time’ or ‘not having time’. A 41-year-old man at Takane
said, ‘A mother’s time is limited. We cannot have emergency meetings after 5 because they leave at 5.
Such an adjustment is very difficult for all of us’. All the women with children whom I interviewed

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LONG HOURS AND THE CORPORATE GENDER DIVIDE IN JAPAN 523

at the two cosmetics companies had corporate husbands who came home after midnight daily. In
addition to their regular cooking and cleaning work at home, the married women with children
picked up their children from nursery schools, made dinner boxes for their children’s evening cram
schools, prepared their children for their entrance exams for elementary or middle school, and
attended weekend PTA meetings.
Workers who are mothers found it difficult to leave the workplace at 5 pm. When they left at 5, they
said they felt they were not doing adequate work, because most people stayed until 8 pm or later. In
addition to the pressure to work long hours, the penalty of a salary reduction increased their sense of
inadequacy at work. Kaoru, a 31-year-old worker at Takane, accepted a salary reduction in order to be
able to leave at 4.30 pm. Kaoru felt bad about co-workers who needed to shoulder what she did not
finish:
I felt really bad about leaving at 4.30. To catch up with work, I ended up working at home. But I still
got a salary reduction. I didn’t like it at all.
Both mothers and women who were not mothers praised the firm’s lenient childcare policy but
expressed mixed feelings about the costs associated with it, including constant emotional guilt about
not finishing their work, pressure to stay at work late or bring work home and the necessity of
accepting salary reductions in return for permission to leave early. Saeko, a 42-year-old worker, also
took a few years of early departure with a salary reduction after her childcare leave:
I used to leave early, around 4.30 or so, and they reduced my salary. When I started this job, my
salary didn’t reach $1,000 every month and most of the money went to the nursery school. So I
questioned the meaning of my work. Why am I doing this? I thought about quitting the job.
The salary reduction decreases their motivation and dampens the aspirations of workers who are
mothers, exacerbating their sense of being inadequate in their jobs. By reducing women’s satisfaction
with their jobs this thus goes against the purpose of the family-friendly policy.
The mothers at Takane and Hanakage, despite their interest in their jobs and aspirations for
promotion, noted that it was not easy for them to attain a managerial position. Yukiko, a 39-year-old,
often hired two child sitters for late in the day, after her children’s nursery school closed, but even
with this help she could not stay at work long enough and expressed frustration over it. If employees
want to be considered potential managers, they are expected to accumulate experience in various
departments of the company, including departments that normalize overtime work. Mothers are
often seen as inflexible and as more being likely to make special requests to have their working hours
shortened, and thus workers who are mothers foresaw that they had fewer chances than other
workers for promotion.
In this culture of long working hours, workers who are mothers are labelled as not having
adequate time for work. They deal with extra unpaid family work, additional stress like guilt over
leaving early, salary reductions and concerns over their limited chances for promotion. The structural
barrier of salary reductions also lowers the satisfaction level and aspirations of workers who are
mothers, and further blocks their opportunities. In contrast, as previous studies have discussed,
workers who are fathers never encounter conflicts as a result of their firms’ long working hours, nor
are they expected to do any work outside their jobs. The generous childcare leave in many firms is
seen as very valuable and necessary to mothers but it does little to address the male-dominated
culture of overwork or the institutional penalty of salary reductions. The ideology of separate spheres
normalizes men’s disassociation from the family sphere and women’s disadvantages associated with
taking the caretaker role in the family.

Discussion

The article argues that the long working hour custom has normalized and reinforced management’s
masculine work norm and stereotypes, women’s depressed aspirations and their choice to opt out,

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Volume 20 Number 5 September 2013
524 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

and the institutional disadvantages of women who are mothers, as well as exempting workers who
are fathers from these same disadvantages. The article also illustrates the fact that the structural
inequality of gender intersects with organizational cultural practices, which are often legitimized and
obscured by workers’ beliefs about gender and the separate spheres of the different genders. It also
offers a theory that the long working hour norm, as a critical element of organizational masculine
practices, shapes employed women’s career paths into the dichotomized patterns of either emulation
of workplace masculinity or opting out entirely from the labour market.
While increasing numbers of Japanese firms are encouraging women’s advancement in manage-
ment, and supporting the continuing employment of mothers after childbirth, the organizational
custom of working long hours that is strongly tied to the ideology of the separate spheres undermines
corporate and individual efforts to reduce gender inequality in the workplace. As Liff and Ward
(2001, p. 34) argue, ‘Unless organizations seriously address informal practices and the messages they
give, then their formal policy initiatives are in danger of being seen as insincere’. To what extent
Japanese firms’ stated goal to improve women workers’ employment status is more than mere
rhetoric needs further investigation.
According to the article’s findings, women managers are expected to follow the masculine work
norm and prioritize work over family and personal matters. While the men I interviewed mostly
had stay-at-home wives, the women managers often remained single or childless. Among the few
women managers who did have children, one talked about her decision to have a child and how
it related to her sense of resignation about her ability to compete and achieve in her career, and the
other described her pregnancy as a physical and mental struggle, in which she dealt with working
overtime and management’s disapproving attitudes toward her. Under the imperative of masculine
management that normalizes workers’ long working hours (Collinson and Collinson, 2004),
women workers who strive for a career may choose to remain single or childless. This may be
partly because these women wish to avoid the double pressures of being good workers and
mothers but it may also be partly that the women’s single status influences male colleagues’ view
of them and the likelihood that they will be accepted by these men as committed and competitive
workers (Watts, 2009).
Working long hours also reinforces women’s blocked opportunities in the employment structure
and promotes women’s choice of domesticity over work. Even though women workers in financial
firms in Japan could change their track position to become career-track workers, the threat of
overwork decreased their desire to do so and most remained in the lower track. In Japanese cosmetic
firms in which overwork is the norm, young single women felt deprived in their personal lives and
anticipated future difficulties in attempting to combine marriage and family with work. This article’s
findings indicate that the long working hour norm diminishes the career aspirations of both non–
career-track and career-track women and often steers them towards the option of leaving a job. The
negative influence of long working hours on women’s aspirations legitimizes the high concentration
of women in non–career-track jobs in financial firms as well as their opting out in firms that do not
have career-track hiring. However, further study of the relations between long working hours and
women workers’ career aspirations, taking into account their structural positions in their firms, will
be necessary.
Meanwhile, some women who were interviewed saw quitting a job for marriage or childbirth as
a gender privilege; an option that enables them to leave inhumane working conditions rather than
as a career sacrifice. The combination of women workers’ view of opting opt out as being better
than continuing to work long hours and their sympathetic view of male workers as having to
engage in overwork with little choice, obscures gender-unequal career paths and rationalizes
women’s lack of power and low status in Japanese firms. Such views seem to reflect the persistence
of a belief in the separate spheres of work and family in Japan in which some Japanese women
view themselves as freed of the responsibility to commit to work, while being able to exercise more
informal and covert power within the family. Such women were thus not concerned about granting
their husbands and other male workers excessive authority, prestige, and respect at work
(Ogasawara, 1998, p. 7).

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LONG HOURS AND THE CORPORATE GENDER DIVIDE IN JAPAN 525

In spite of the cosmetic firms’ relatively lenient offer of parental leave, mothers reported a high
degree of pressure to spend time both at work and with the family, and high levels of guilt for leaving
the workplace earlier than co-workers, not completing their assigned tasks and receiving a salary
reduction. In contrast, fathers who work long hours did not have such experiences and were largely
indifferent to them. Salary reductions, in particular, appear to be a crucial structural impediment to
a truly family-friendly policy, as it is usually the woman who takes the salary reduction and family
leave, thus increasing the gender pay gap.
Because these findings are based on a very small sample they cannot be assumed to reflect the
situation in all Japanese companies in Japan. Further large-scale studies of organizational cultures
with regard to long working hours and gender inequality will be necessary. These findings do
suggest, however, that research on gender inequality in Japan should take into account the fact that
the socially and culturally normalized practice of working long hours continues to limit women’s
career options and prospects and their advancement in the labour market. Furthermore, while this
study uncovered the indifference of many male workers to parenting, further studies on male as well
as female workers who deviate from the male breadwinner–based division of labour in the Japanese
workplace will help us to understand ongoing changes in Japanese firms.
The custom of working long hours has long been a central characteristic of the Japanese employ-
ment structure, as it is considered to be a trade-off for the lifelong employment security that comes
with it. Historically tied to the cultural value of self-sacrifice and Japanese nationalism, the tradition
of the long working day promoted the idea of hard work and the nation’s postwar economic
advancement. As a result, the resistance of public and corporate culture to changing this custom
remains strong, even when the lifelong employment system increasingly is criticized as a costly and
constraining custom with regard to labour mobility (Keizer, 2009; Schoppa, 2006). Just as the effi-
ciency of the lifelong employment system is coming under scrutiny, so should the costs of the long
working hours norm in Japanese firms be reevaluated. This article’s findings on long working hours
show that it is not just women workers who suffer ill effects as a result; this custom also has adverse
effects on male workers, who reported serious health problems and family and marital crises stem-
ming from their unavailability at home. It may be time for Japanese firms to pay serious attention to
how much their dedication to traditional gender-based customs such as long working hours costs
organizations and individuals.
As the article argues, the long working hours norm is likely to further polarize the increasingly
well-educated women of Japan. As Schoppa (2006, p. 206) rightly points out:

the women of the future will simply divide themselves into neatly childless career women on the
one hand and mothers on the other, the former supplying Japan with labor and the latter giving the
nation its children.

However, it should be also be noted that dichotomization of women workers in Japan occurs not only
because educated women are being divided into those who are career-oriented and those who are
family-oriented but also because these women’s options and opportunities continue to remain
limited, regardless of their increasing aspirations and qualifications.

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