Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, not known for a particularly feminist outlook, has made female employment a national priority for his administration to cope with a looming fiscal crisis that he hopes working women can help solve.
In our anti-Malthusian age, many women in rich democracies – and in Japan, women in droves – have put off childbirth until and unless they can see a way to balance family and career. Declining birthrates have meant falling ratios of tax-paying workers to pensioners, portending the possible collapse of the pension system.
