Nearly two decades ago, Japan started running out of workers, dragging on economic growth. Making things worse is the fact that seven-tenths of Japanese women drop out of the workforce after having their first child. Getting them back to work could boost Japan’s GDP by as much as 15% (paywall), says Abe. And the way to do that was to make maternity leave longer.
Japan is hardly the only country that would benefit from keeping more mothers in the labor force. If American women worked at the same rates men did, US GDP could grow 9%, say economists; France’s would pop by more than 11%; and Italy’s would see a whopping 23% boost, according to OECD calculations. The average across the OECD would total 12%.
There’s only one problem with Abe’s plan: It’s targeting the wrong people. More maternity leave might sound like a great idea, but as long as mothers are the only parents taking leave, longer stints at home actually worsens job discrimination against them and makes them less likely to pursue a career.
Rather, as the experiences of Sweden, Iceland, and a handful of other countries show, the secret to keeping mothers in the workforce lies not in giving them more time off, but in getting more fathers to stay at home instead.
