"An Empirical Study on the Effectiveness of Work-Life Balance and Equal Opportunity Policies"

SATO, Hiroki  Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo - Professor

Is work-life balance compatible with equal opportunity employment?
Do work-life balance and equal opportunity employment produce positive effects on human resources management?

This project picks up two issues related to support for the work-life balance in companies and measures for equal employment opportunities, and conducts empirical research, including international comparisons on such matters as the current status,relationship and effects of both issues.

The following are the reasons why we have focused on both support for the work-life balance and measures for equal employment opportunities.

"Support for work-life balance" asks whether or not there are working styles and systems that allow people to continue working during various events in life such as childbearing, childrearing, and nursing care. "Equal employment opportunities" asks whether or not the company is a place where employees can actively work according to their motivation and ability regardless of sex. If the state of the human resource management of a company is measured by how far it realized "equal employment opportunities" and "support for work-life balance", it will belong to one of four types. At the time when the Equal Employment Opportunity Act was passed, its main objective was to allow women with motivation and ability to go on the same career path as men.In order to enhance opportunities for women to demonstrate their abilities, however, it is essential to improve "support for work-life balance" in parallel with improving "equality". In companies where "support for work-life balance" is insufficient even if "equality" has been realized, we should not think of the way men work based on division of labor role by sex but we must change it. In order to realize "support for work-life balance", the key will be to review the way men work, and it will be essential to change the way of working and way of management.

The approach for research aims at empirically clarifying: 1) the impact of work-life balance support measures and Equal Employment Opportunity measures on matters such as business management, human resource utilization, job behavior, and enhancement of opportunities for women to demonstrate their abilities; and 2) ideal management such as labor hour control and job control that can realize work-life balance support measures and equal employment opportunities by re-analyzing the SSJ data archive of the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, the data sets owned by overseas data archives, and the data sets available to project participants. We also include in our analyses international comparisons and inter-industry research regarding WLB support measures. We will define within fiscal 2008 a dataset that each of the participating members can pick up for his/her analysis, start specific analysis from fiscal 2009, and then prepare the primary analysis reports the same year. As for understanding the current status and problems of WLB support, we will hold close information exchanges with the Work Life Balance Promotion and Research Project being carried out jointly by the Institute of Social Science and a private-sector company.

FUWA, Makiko  University of Tokyo, Institute of Social Science - Research Associate
TANAKA, Sigeto  Tohoku University, Graduate School of Arts and Letters - Associate Professor
NAGAI, Akiko  Japan Women's University, Faculty of Integrated Arts and Social Sciences - Associate Professor
TANAKA, Keiko  The Institute for Research on Household Economics - Research Fellow
MIZUOCHI, Masaaki  Mie University, Faculty of Humanities, Law and Economics - Associate Professor
TSUTSUI, Junya  Ritsumeikan University, Department of Social Sciences - Associate Professor
NAKAMURA, Mayumi  University of Toyama, Graduate school of Economics - Associate Professor
ASAI, Yukiko  Keio University, Graduate School of Economics -Ph.D. Student
HARA, Hiromi  The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training - Researcher