In the 21st century, girls’ education is both an intrinsic right and a critical lever to achieve gender equality which is the unequal treatment or perceptions of individuals based on their gender. Providing girls with an education will lead to amazing impacts in the society from a higher economic participation to changing people's mindsets and hence treating women more equally. When women gain access to a quality education rooted in human rights and gender equality, it creates a ripple effect of more opportunities for generations to come. There are different forms of gender inequality mainly in terms of educational attainment, economic participation and opportunity, health and survival, and political empowerment. In this essay, I will be focusing on the gender discrimination towards women as they continue to suffer severe disadvantage and exclusion in different aspects throughout their lives despite progress in recent years and referring to the case studies in China and Japan to conclude whether education will reduce gender inequality in economical participation and opportunities. Education will be referred to the structured and formal schooling of females that is right-based and of equal quality as that received by their male counterparts.
Education will allow women to acquire necessary skills and information for them to know and protect their own rights and get employed by companies, hence reducing gender inequality by increasing economic participation and opportunities for women. However, there is a need for an anti-discrimination environment where educated women with the necessary skills for the job can work in to unleash their potential and contribute to the society. Companies will have to provide them with opportunities and a role in the workplace for them to succeed in and families and employers have to change their mindsets to support women in climbing the career ladder. Education can be defined in terms of school curriculums to equip students with useful skills, solving illiteracy and women's security. Illiteracy and innumeracy are significant barriers that prevent women from being able to make use of the already very limited rights they may legally have such as owning property or to appeal against unfair judgment and unjust treatment as they cannot read the legal rights in rule books. Therefore, absence of education can directly lead to insecurity of deprived and unprivileged women by distancing them from the ways and means of fighting against gender inequality. When women succeed in getting secondary and tertiary education, they develop self-confidence and skills from being able to read and write and can be hired by companies to work, and this will result in an increase in economic participation by women in the workforce, which in turn reduces the gender inequality gap in the economical aspect. Hence, the link between education and security underlines the importance of education, which is a basic need in the 21st century of human development, that can allow women to acquire information and skills that will lead to increased earning power and greater awareness to their legal rights to tackle gender discrimination. In China, the Sixth National Census showed that the average years of schooling for women over the age of six were 8.4 years in 2010, 1.3 years more than in 2000, and the gender gap had narrowed by 0.2 year as compared with 2000, showing that more years of schooling will reduce the gender inequality gap significantly. In 2010, China had about 137 million female workers, accounting for 42.6% of the country’s workforce as compared to just 7.5% in 1949. According to a study by Grant Thornton, the proportion of women in senior management reached 51%, outpacing the global average of 21%. (Grant Thornton, 2013) This shows that Chinese women are performing well in large corporations as they receive more education opportunities to equip them with the skills to receive more career development opportunities and freedom in choosing what women want to do.
Education can also be done in terms of awareness programmes to increase awareness of the public about gender discrimination towards women, hence changing the mindsets and attitudes of people about women's rights. However, traditional attitudes about the status and role of women also have to be eradicated for people to change their mindsets. Today, it has become the norm for husbands and wives to make family decisions jointly in China, and that more than 70 percent of women have taken part in making major family decisions. More women can share family resources on an equal basis with men, and the concept of men and women sharing housework is now accepted, with the housework time gap between men and women shortened from 150 minutes in 2006 to 74 minutes now. This shows that people are giving up on following cultural norms and have changed their mindsets due to increased education which allows them to be more aware of the gender discrimination against women. When education changes the attitudes of women's families and employers, women will be given more opportunities for economical participation and will be supported by their families. In China, principles and concepts of gender equality are gradually extending into teaching and scientific research. More schools have begun to introduce the idea of gender equality in educational content and teaching methods, and primary and high schools are now offering courses in gender equality, directing younger students to relate to the idea of gender equality. Gender equality has also been introduced to teacher training programs and normal school courses to enhance teachers’ awareness of gender equality. Women’s studies continues to strengthen as a discipline in institutions of higher learning. Currently, more than 100 colleges and universities offer in excess of 440 courses on women’ s studies and gender equality, and the number of master’s and doctoral programs on women’s studies continues to grow. China has also included gender equality in the national plans of philosophy and social sciences to support research in gender equality and women’s issues. This has led to a change in people's mindsets changing and accepting that men and women deserve equal and fair treatment and treating women as equals to men.
There are many plans proposed by Japan and China to reduce gender inequality. For example, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe launched an ambitious plan known as "Abenomics" to restart Japan's economy and one of Abe's planned structural reforms is a strategy to persuade more Japanese women to join the workforce, to remain in the workforce after they have children, and to advance higher on the career ladder and hence narrow the gap between men and women in the workforce. The government aims to increase the availability of daycare centres as more than 23,000 children are on waiting lists and the lack of childcare options is a major reason why women leave their careers. The government has pledged a “zero childcare waiting-list project,” by increasing childcare capacity by 400,000 children by 2017 through opening more childcare centers by utilizing a rental system and government-owned land, hiring new childcare workers, subsidizing small-scale childcare businesses and assisting unregistered childcare centers seeking registration. This will make it easier for women to return to work after childbirth. The Japanese government is also encouraging the private sector to promote more women within their companies and has proposed supporting companies that encourage female employees to pursue both career and family through subsidies and tax measures. In China, the government has implemented the Compulsory Education Law of the People’s Republic of China and other relevant policies to improve women’s education. It has implemented a special policy to ensure school-age girls enjoy equal access to compulsory education. In 2014, the net primary school enrolment rates of boys and girls were both 99.8 percent, meaning that China has achieved the United Nations Millennium Development Goals ahead of time. Due to the law, women are given greater opportunities in junior high school education and above, particularly further education, narrowing the gender gap in education.
However, girls face varied and multilayered disadvantages in gender discrimination which highlights the complex interrelatedness between gender and other disparities, along with the deep-rooted nature of these inequalities. Even with education, barriers such as poverty, ethnic background, disability, or traditional attitudes about women's status and role all undermine women's ability to exercise their rights. Thus, girls’ access to education alone might not be able to address these structural barriers and is unable to reduce gender inequality in the various aspects.
Firstly, strong cultural beliefs that persist in a society make it difficult for education to reduce gender inequality in the economic aspect. Unmarried women continue to be pressurized into marriage and child birth by social expectations, while working women with children and aging parents need to bear the domestic and childcare responsibilities, forcing many women to exit the workforce despite being highly-educated. In Japan, traditional gender roles have always been a major source that leads to gender inequality. Statistics show that Japanese women spend an average of 299 minutes a day on housework while men spend on average only 62 minutes a day on housework, showing how traditional gender roles of a working husband and stay-at-home wife remain firmly rooted in Japan's society. More than half of Japanese women attend college and polls indicate that many women wish to return to work after having children but they struggle to return to work in the face of rigid gender roles and social expectations that women should be responsible for a family while working but acceptable for men to sacrifice family life over work. They are trapped in cultural expectations of how women should be wives, mothers and daughters and feel discouraged and hopeless. In addition, gender discrimination is deeply engrained into many countries's institutions since the past. Japan has numerous anti-discrimination laws, but tax, pension, social security and health insurance are based on the model of a four-person family with a working father and a stay-at-home mother. In Japan, companies pay men a higher salary if their wives stay home while women who restart as part-timers can only earn a limited amount of money. Today, Japan has tax incentives which entices women to remain at home instead of working. Thus, the presence of negative negative social norms and tax incentives by governments where women are expected to take care of the family cause 70% of well-educated women to exit the workforce for a decade or more when they have their first child, hence resulting in the low labor participation rate of women as compared to men who can sacrifice family life over work. When men and women do similar work, there is a sizeable pay gap between men and women.
Furthermore, there is a lack of opportunity and support from their employers, families and country for educated married women who have children to continue working. Most human resources departments reject women when they have more than a three-year blank in their curriculum, suggesting that they have lost their skills and competitiveness. Hence, women who have quit their jobs to give birth might not be given a chance to continue working after that. Also, there is normally a sizeable pay gap between men and women when men and women do similar work. In Japan, researchers conducted a cross-national survey to enable comparisons in pay for similar work and showed that Japan had the 87th largest pay gap for similar work. In addition, many countries's work culture still revolves around full-time employees working long hours and do not offer flexible work hours that would allow women to adjust their schedules to meet child-rearing demands. These countries' lack a support system for mothers wanting to return to work after giving birth, and hence places them in the difficult situation of having to choose between either forging a career or becoming a stay-at-home mom. It is impossible to combine work and family and women end up quitting their jobs to raise the family even if they are educated, resulting in gender inequality. This kind of working environment where women are treated unfairly and not given a chance to produce results makes it challenging for women to continue working after raising children. Women who do want to relaunch their careers can only get part-time jobs with a low wage which is very low compared to what full-time workers earn, so lots of companies want to keep the system as it is for cheap labour force. Moreover, women's families might not support them in their pursues in career. In Japan, women who continue to work after giving birth find that their husbands are unsupportive. Legally, both men and women can take parental leave in Japan. However, only 2% of male employees took parental leave in 2013 all over Japan, reinforcing the notion that it is the woman's role to care for a baby. Many male employees are also concerned that taking such leave will put their career in jeopardy for career advances. Japanese men, in fact, are among the men who do the least amount of house chores in any developed country.
In conclusion, I agree that education will reduce gender inequality, With changes being made by joint efforts of the government, corporations and the society to alleviate cultural norms and provide sufficient support for women to pursue their careers, this would pave the way for education to reverse gendered patterns of discrimination by reducing gender inequality in terms of educational attainment, economic participation and opportunity, health and survival, and political empowerment.