Upper House Election: Women Still Disproportionate in Diet 80 Years After Suffrage Win; Walls Remain High for Women to Participate in Politics
As many as 152 women, the second highest number in history, are running for upper house seats. However, they account for less than 30% of all candidates and still clearly lag male candidates in number. Each political party is trying to increase their number of female candidates, but the walls remain high for women to participate in politics.
'Progress is slow for the participation of women in politics, and breaking down walls is very hard,' said Midori Takahashi with a sigh in Yuzawa, Akita Prefecture. The 76-year-old is the great-granddaughter of Haru Wazaki (1885-1952), one of the first female politicians in Japan.
Women were granted the right to vote and run for public office in Japan for the first time under the revised House of Representatives election law (now the Public Offices Election Law), which was promulgated in December 1945, about four months after the end of World War II. The following year, 79 women ran for the first postwar lower house election, and 39 won a seat. Wazaki ran and received 100,622 votes, the most in her constituency in Akita Prefecture.After the death of her husband, who was in the military, Wazaki became a hair stylist so she could raise her five children. She was also devoted to the liberation of women living in licensed red-light districts. Her life as a lower house member was short, just one year. But she continued to engage in activities that contributed to society, such as providing support for the livelihood of women in farming villages.
Takahashi became a social welfare worker to carry on Wazaki's resolve.
'She worked very hard for the advancement of women,' Takahashi said of her great-grandmother.
According to the Cabinet Office, women accounted for 15.7% of members in the House of Representatives as of November last year and for 25.4% in the House of Councillors as of March this year. Since 1946, the percentage of women in the entire Diet has gradually increased.
However, according to sources including research by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which has many national parliaments as its members, as of July 1, Japan ranks 138th among the world's approximately 190 countries for the percentage of women in politics. The ranking was based on the number of female members in Japan's lower house. Among the Group of Seven countries, Japan placed last.
To increase women's participation in politics, the Law on Promotion of Gender Equality in the Political Field, which was enforced in 2018, asked political parties to try as much as they can to even up the number of their male and female candidates in elections. And yet, the number of female candidates has remained largely unchanged. The percentage of women candidates in the upper house election in 2022 increased from 28.1% in 2019 to 33.2%, but this year the percentage dropped to 29.1%.Why is women's participation in politics slow to make progress?
'There are many walls, but the one particularly big wall is that of combining activities [as a Diet member and as a parent],' said Takae Ito, 50, an upper house member.
Ito serves as the secretary general of a cross-party parliamentary group of mothers and fathers. The group aims to create child-rearing policies and promotes political participation of parents raising children.
It is difficult to juggle parenting and Diet member activities, such as taking part in Diet deliberations and meeting supporters. Ito won her seat for the first time in 2016. At that time, she was raising two small children and could not find any other Diet members in a similar situation.
'There was no one involved in parenting among those who decided policies on child-rearing. The Diet was not a place where one could work while also raising children,' Ito recalled.
She added: 'There's still a deep-rooted notion that men conduct politics. It's necessary for us to change our mindset [as Diet members] and create a mechanism for us to be able to get on with parliamentary activities without any trouble even while raising children.'
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