Japanese Ruling Party Pushes Women to be Wage-Earners

While Japan is under fire from the U.N. for paltry efforts toward gender equality, their massive tax change proposal promises to push more women into the workforce.
Japan’s August 30 election saw the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) soundly defeat the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Yukio Hatoyama was installed as the Prime Minister. By American standards, DPJ could be simplified as the more fiscally progressive party; their platforms include a freeze on sales tax, increases in minimum wage, free public education, and most notably, a $289-per-child monthly allowance for families.
How will DPJ possibly fund such a large monthly child allowance? The Japan Times reports that the DPJ proposes cutting tax deductions for spouses, which would force wives employed in part-time work into full time work. Since 1961, tax deductions for dependent spouses have discouraged women from finding full-time work. To remain qualified as dependents on their breadwinner husbands, Japanese wives operate under an effective income ceiling of 1.3 million Japanese yen, or $14,456.

The ¥1.03 million income ceiling for spouses compares with an average annual salary of ¥4.37 million for private-sector employees in 2007 — ¥5.42 million for men and ¥2.71 million for women — according to the latest data released by the National Tax Agency.
It is common for wives to work fewer hours than their spare time from housework and child-rearing allows so they can take advantage of the system, which is widely regarded as giving housewives preferential treatment.
The DPJ says it wants to abolish the system under the assumption it has discouraged women from attaining economic self-reliance.
“The current tax system that particularly gives nonworking housewives preferential treatment is problematic and we think it should be rectified,” then DPJ Secretary General Katsuya Okada said at a news conference Sept. 4.

The DPJ’s assumption of power and accompanying promises, if implemented, will embody a major social change. Already, the Asahi Shinbun says,

As a result of the Aug. 30 election, the percentage of female Lower House lawmakers climbed into double digits for the first time, reaching 11.25 percent. Even so, that represented a rise of just 3 percentage points from the first postwar election in 1946, when women accounted for 8.4 percent.

Japanese law also currently requires that couples pick just one surname to be recognized as married, and unsurprisingly, couples most frequently choose the husband’s. The DPJ has further vowed to abolish this policy, and encourage married women to keep their surnames.
Woo hoo!

Note: the picture is from a fistfight that broke out in the Japanese Diet, or Parliament.