Advertisement Under Japan’s women’s advancement strategy, dubbed “womenomics,” a record number of women joined the labor force to help fill the country’s chronic labor shortage and resuscitate the sluggish economy. Amid Japan’s rapidly declining fertility rates and an aging population, then Prime Minister Abe Shinzo named women Japan’s hidden asset – an underutilized resource that could alleviate pressure to look for foreign migrants to solve the labor crunch. Amid Abe’s focus on womenomics, women’s labor force participation in Japan rose from 50 percent in 2015 to 52.7 percent in 2019, with an extra 3.3 million women gaining employment. Traditionally, many women in Japan stopped working after getting married. Nowadays there are many women who continue to work after marriage but leave before the birth of their first child with their husbands becoming the sole breadwinner. After years of raising children, when these women return to the workplace they are often left with low paid, low skilled, irregular, and unstable jobs. Temporary workers earn 60 percent less than permanent employees and women make up 56.4 percent of the temporary worker labor force, according to the Health Ministry’s 2019 Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions.