Shoko Kawata simply turned the primary mayor in Japan’s historical past to remain in workplace whereas changing into a mom. She organized for a deputy to cowl her maternity depart, with out resigning and with out apologizing. That was sufficient to set off a nationwide debate, full with commentators who discovered it “inappropriate” for an elected official to step away from her duties for a number of months. Kawata summed it up with disarming simplicity: Establishments might adapt, however individuals change way more slowly, and she or he can not flip herself into a person.
Japan has a phrase for what she is up towards: matahara, a contraction of “maternity harassment.” It covers all the pieces achieved to pregnant workers and new moms at work—strain to resign, demotions upon return from depart, initiatives reassigned, managers who deal with a being pregnant as a private betrayal. The phrase is so extensively used that it belongs to the on a regular basis vocabulary of Japanese working life.
The Japanese have an actual expertise for coining phrases that stick, and office tradition has given them loads of materials. There may be karoshi, or demise from overwork, formally acknowledged and compensated by the state for the reason that Nineteen Eighties. Within the late 2010s, they coined the phrase KuToo to seek advice from the motion towards obligatory excessive heels at work, a triple pun on kutsu (shoe), kutsū (ache), and #MeToo. When a phenomenon is widespread sufficient to deserve its personal phrase, it says lots about what’s anticipated from employees. Give us your life. Be a reasonably worker or else . . . and select between your job and a toddler.
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There’s a paradox. Japan desperately wants kids. In 2025, its fertility price fell to 1.14 kids per girl, a historic low and the tenth consecutive 12 months of decline. In Tokyo, the speed has dropped beneath one little one per girl. Deaths have outnumbered births for 19 straight years. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi calls it a “silent emergency.” But girls’s labor drive participation nonetheless follows the identical curve it has for many years: It climbs after commencement, then collapses at marriage or first beginning. A rustic with a significant want for infants retains structurally punishing the ladies who’ve them.
Individuals may be tempted to learn this as an unique story a few faraway work tradition. They shouldn’t.
America’s fertility price is falling too, and moms are being pushed out of labor
The U.S. common fertility price fell to 53.1 births per 1,000 girls of reproductive age in 2025, one other report low, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The speed has declined 23% since 2007. The whole fertility price now sits beneath 1.6 kids per girl, far underneath the two.1 wanted for inhabitants stability. About 3.6 million infants had been born final 12 months, and immigration restrictions imply there may be much less demographic slack to compensate.
In the meantime, American moms are leaving the workforce at a tempo not seen in a long time. Greater than 400,000 girls exited the U.S. labor drive within the first half of 2025, according to a University of Kansas analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the steepest decline in over 40 years for moms of younger kids. Labor drive participation amongst moms with kids youthful than 5 fell almost 3 share factors between January and June 2025. A KPMG analysis discovered the sharpest drop amongst college-educated moms of very younger kids, whose participation slid from near 80% in 2023 to about 77%. Fathers’ participation rose barely over the identical interval.
In all probability, childcare is the principle driver. Already scarce, it’s getting scarcer. The average price of care reached $13,184 per year in 2025, and 46% of American children under 6 live in a licensed childcare desert. In the meantime, immigration raids have shrunk the workforce, Head Start funding is flat despite inflation, and the July 2025 budget legislation cuts deeply into Medicaid, which covers about 40% of U.S. births.
Return-to-office mandates did the remainder: The share of Fortune 500 companies requiring full-time office attendance nearly doubled in 2025, from 13% to 24%. The pandemic-era flexibility that had pushed girls’s labor drive participation to report highs in 2023 has been methodically dismantled, and moms absorbed the shock.
The earnings penalties are nicely documented. Of their landmark cross-country study of child penalties, economists Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and their coauthors discovered that American moms lose roughly 30% of their earnings in the long term after a primary beginning, whereas fathers lose primarily nothing. That penalty compounds over a profession, into decrease financial savings, decrease Social Safety advantages, and a wider gender hole at each subsequent stage.
Medals is not going to produce infants
Towards this alarming backdrop, the administration’s reply has been rhetoric. President Trump has known as himself the “fertilization president.” Congress created $1,000 “Trump Accounts” for newborns; a $5,000 child bonus has been floated, together with a proposed Nationwide Medal of Motherhood for girls with six or extra kids. On the White Home, a wave of high-profile pregnancies among senior figures has been offered as proof of a family-friendly administration. Katie Miller declared that essentially the most radical factor a lady can do is embrace her “organic future.”
The message behind all that is clear: Ladies ought to keep residence and have kids. The issue is that this mannequin has already been examined, and it fails. Money bonuses and honorary medals have a poor monitor report in all places they’ve substituted for infrastructure. The demographic proof factors in the other way: The international locations that resist fertility decline finest are these the place girls can mix careers and youngsters with out penalty. France lengthy illustrated this relative benefit over Japan and Germany, the place the motherhood penalty reaches 62% of misplaced earnings and two-thirds of moms work part-time. And certainly, U.S. federal statistics present the pronatalist push has not moved the needle: Fertility hit a brand new historic low in 2025.
Japan spent three a long time proving {that a} nation can not harass its moms into having extra infants. It even gave us the vocabulary. A nation that wishes kids should first settle for that moms should be allowed to stay full employees, with skilled ambition and full incomes. The truth that one mayor taking maternity depart nonetheless makes nationwide information, in Japan or anyplace else, is a measure of how far we now have to go.
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