Men's parental leave in Japan

Name: Men's parental leave in Japan
Creator: Corpus

how many men actually take it

The share of eligible men who took parental leave. The distribution is bimodal — a mass at 0% and another at 100%, so the average and the median both hide what is going on.

Median

56.3%

16,170 companies disclose it

Split at the ends

27% / 26%

share of companies at 0% and at 100%

Highest sector

83.0%

Finance and insurance

Lowest sector

30.8%

Accommodations, eating and drinking services

Distribution

16,170 companies. The two ends are tall and the median (56.3%) sits in the valley between them. 27% of companies report 0% and 26% report 100%. The median, not the mean — a few extreme filings would drag the mean around.

By sector

Sector	Companies	Median	25th pct	75th pct
Finance and insurance	410	83.0	46.0	100.0
Electricity, gas, heat supply and water	80	75.0	50.0	100.0
Information and communications	1,313	73.0	47.0	100.0
Manufacturing	3,934	67.0	33.3	100.0
Real estate and goods rental and leasing	312	66.7	20.0	100.0
Scientific research, professional and technical services	463	52.1	0.0	100.0
Transport and postal services	747	50.0	0.0	88.9
Living-related and personal services and amusement services	223	50.0	0.0	100.0
Industries unable to classify	128	50.0	0.0	90.5
Medical, health care and welfare	2,061	50.0	0.0	100.0
Wholesale and retail trade	2,304	50.0	0.0	87.5
Services, n.e.c.	2,036	50.0	0.0	100.0
Compound services	173	45.4	0.0	75.0
Construction	1,122	40.0	0.0	83.3
Education, learning support	299	40.0	0.0	72.7
Accommodations, eating and drinking services	470	30.8	0.0	75.0

Sectors with at least 50 disclosing companies (16 of them). Finance and insurance and Accommodations, eating and drinking services differ by 52.2%. Sectors are the major divisions of Japan's standard industrial classification; company size is not held constant.

How to read this

This counts people, not time. A single day of leave counts, so 100% can still mean a few days each. National surveys put most men's leave at under two weeks.
Companies disclose these figures themselves, under Japan's Youth Employment Promotion Act, and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare publishes the collected data (Shokuba-Lab). This is not from annual securities reports, so the population differs from the rest of this site — listed and unlisted alike, but only those that disclose.
Companies that disclose nothing are absent. Firms with worse numbers have more reason to stay quiet, so read these figures as the optimistic end of reality.
These are company-level averages. One department can be far worse than the company figure and never show up.
Per-company figures for listed companies are on each company page (company index).

Not sure how this works in Japan? Parental leave: how the system works.

Other benchmarks

Retirement payouts ・ Bonuses ・ Starting salaries ・ Overtime hours ・ Paid leave uptake ・ Men's parental leave ・ Women in management ・ all benchmarks.

Source: Shokuba-Lab (職場情報総合サイト) and the Database of Companies Promoting Women's Participation, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare — open data, compiled by Corpus. 16,170 companies. Not provided or endorsed by any government agency. Japanese edition: 男性の育児休業取得率の相場.