• Analyses & Alternatives
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.87-121
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• 2021

Since 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe'sadministration began to promote women's participation and advancement in the workplace and established the Act on the Promotion of Female Participation and Career Advancement in the Workplace (the Act) in 2015. Some criticize this Act as a way to utilize women for economic development and to deal with the shrinking working population. In contrast, others point out that it is a law that can be beneficial for women. As such, this Act serves as an interesting case of a women's policy promoted by a conservative government. This paper's objective is to shed light on if and how women are substantively represented in the Diet members' statements made during the legislative debate of the bill on the Promotion of Female Participation and Career Advancement in the Workplace between 2014 and 2015. This paper asks two research questions. First, based on the mixed evaluation of the Act made in the studies about the Abe administration's women's policies, this research asks if the Diet members speak of women as resources to use for other economic and social goals or if women are substantively represented. Second, drawing insights from the literature on women's substantive representation, this research asks how Diet members speak for women. Particularly, based on the studies on conservatism and substantive representation of women, this question seeks to determine if Diet members engage in the conservative representation of women, taking women's roles as mothers and wives who provide care for children, husbands, and elders at home for granted. The results of the analysis demonstrate that the number of statements that explicitly claimed to use women was small. Second, while some Diet members of conservative political parties engaged in the conservative representation of women, there were more instances of non-conservative representation, in which a variety of types of women were represented. These findings reveal that even when the conservative government's intention to submit the bill was to utilize women rather than acting for women, Diet members could speak for various types of women and engage in the non-conservative representation of women. The findings also imply the importance of paying attention to formal and informal legislative deliberation rules to figure out how women's substantive representation can occur under a conservative government and in a legislature dominated by conservative parties.