Japan’s Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT) found in a 2020 survey that 68% of Japanese women left their job at marriage or childbirth — and of those who left, 49% cited structural push factors (rigid work schedules, unsupportive employer, inadequate childcare) rather than a positive preference for full-time caregiving. The Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office documents the long-run cost: women who re-entered the workforce after a childrearing break did so predominantly as non-regular workers, earning 50-60% of the wages of continuously employed regular workers at equivalent career stages. This persistent wage penalty is the material basis for retrospective regret among women who departed.
Among women who continued working, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s 2021 Equal Employment Opportunity Survey found that approximately 31% reported experiencing matahara (maternity harassment) — negative treatment by employers, managers, or colleagues following pregnancy disclosure or return from statutory maternity leave. A systematic review published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2020) found that working mothers in Japan report significantly higher work-family conflict than their counterparts in other OECD nations, driven by Japan’s long working-hour culture, limited affordable childcare infrastructure, and employer presenteeism expectations. The inaction path, in other words, carries real documented costs even for women who retain employment.
The bilateral regret pattern here is action-dominates — an outcome driven by Japan’s specific M-curve institutional structure, not by a universal regret asymmetry. The principal interpretive caveat is that 49% captures structural coercion rather than free choice: a woman forced out by an inflexible employer is not making the same kind of bilateral decision as someone choosing between two viable options. The M-curve has partially flattened since the 2017 Womenomics policy reforms, and women entering the workforce in the mid-2020s face somewhat different institutional conditions than those who made this decision before 2015. Japan’s record-low fertility rate of 1.20 in 2023 partly reflects women opting out of parenthood entirely as a rational response to the unresolved work-family conflict this entry documents — a third path not captured by the binary framing of the decision.