Society
Gender Pay Gap Fails to Narrow After Japan Forces Disclosure
- Large companies often have biggest salary disparities
- Data suggests disclosure alone isn’t enough to spur change
On average, a full-time female employee in Japan earns about 21% less than her male equivalent, compared with a 14% gap in the UK and less than 6% in Denmark.
Photographer: Shoko Takayasu/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Two years after Japan made it mandatory for its companies to disclose their gender pay gap, there’s little progress toward equality, with the highest-paying firms showing some of the biggest disparities.
Of Japan’s 100 largest companies by market cap, 70 had disclosed two years’ worth of data that could be analyzed by Bloomberg as of Aug. 15. Only one of them saw a more than 5 percentage point improvement in its gender pay gap.