TOKYO: Japan’s parliament will get two more women’s toilet cubicles, officials said on Thursday (Jul 2), after a petition by 58 female MPs called for more facilities to match their improved representation.
In Japan, gender roles are rigid and women are chronically underrepresented in politics, with just 68 women lawmakers elected out of 465 seats up for grabs at the last lower house election in February.
The government says it wants to have women in at least 30 per cent of the legislative seats.
“The toilet next to the main chamber has only two individual cubicles for women, but the number will be expanded to four” after the current Diet session ends on Jul 17, a lower house spokeswoman told AFP.
She added, without wishing to be named, that plans to add more stalls on other floors were also under consideration.
“I welcome the move to improve, if only a little, the sheer shortage of women’s restrooms for Diet staff and secretaries as well,” Hideko Nishioka, the only woman on the committee involved in approving the expansion, told local media.
The cross-party petition, whose 58 signatories included Japan’s first woman Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, was submitted in December to the lower house committee on rules and administration.
“Before plenary sessions start, so many women lawmakers queue up in front of the restroom,” one of the signatories, Yasuko Komiyama from the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party, said at the time.
The Diet building was finished in 1936, nearly a decade before women got the vote in December 1945 following Japan’s defeat in World War II.
The entire lower house building has 12 men’s toilets with 67 stalls and nine women’s facilities with a total of 22 cubicles, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.
Japan ranked 118 out of 148 last year in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report. Women are also grossly under-represented in business and the media.
In elections, women candidates say that they often have to deal with sexist jibes, including being told that they should be at home looking after children.
