Around the World, Women Find Very Different Roads to Wider Rights

Iran now also has a four-month compulsory maternity leave and an equal-opportunity labor law. In December, four women lawyers became judges in the family courts. Even the more moderate Egyptian government doesn't have women judges.

Despite these successes, many secularists strongly oppose using Islamic discourse to promote women's rights. They say it's useless to argue with rigidly conservative Islamic clergy who have had years of study and will just answer a verse for a verse.

"You can play their game, but you'll never win, because it's their game," says Nadia Wassef, an Egyptian women's rights activist.

- Sarah Gauch

In Japan, women buck corporate conventions

TOKYO

Yumi Kitahira is chief of account administration at a foreign investment firm in Tokyo, which women her mother's age find remarkable enough. But there's more - she's married.

In the world's second-largest economy, it's still widely expected that a working woman will resign after marriage. But a growing number of women are entering the labor force these days and, like Ms. Kitahira, staying.

In Japan, money has long been a source of power for women. In the past, a wife's control of the household finances gave her clout at home. These days, women's ability to earn money outside the home is freeing them from traditional roles and expectations.

Their experience is changing Japan. Birth rates are declining, divorce rates are going up, and the age at which women marry has risen as more enjoy the freedom an income brings.

"Now, many women don't feel they have to marry unless they want to," says Sumiko Iwao, a professor at Tokyo's Keio University and author of "The Japanese Woman." "Income has contributed greatly toward their independence."

Kitahira was encouraged to work and has support at home. "My father always told me a girl can work just like a boy," she says.

She estimates that 60 percent of her married friends have chosen a domestic life, but she argues they are no less liberated than she is. "They are doing what they want to do," she says. But she notes, "I'm more independent than my mother because I earn money."

Independence, it should be noted, is not the same as equality, which is seen differently here than in the US. Americans assume equality is an absolute. Japanese see it as a balance of responsibility, advantage, and opportunity in the long run. Husbands might enjoy some advantages in a full-time job, but wives have greater freedom at home. If the pluses of both situations balance out, they're seen as equal. This attitude, along with the fact that Japan has enshrined equal rights in its Constitution (unlike the US), makes the debate here different. It means that in Japan, equal rights are less of an issue than is equal opportunity, says Professor Iwao.

Japanese women have worked shoulder to shoulder with men before. After World War II, Japan's percentage of working women was one of the highest in the world - although most had low-paying jobs. But as the economy improved in the 1960s, many stayed home.

With Japan's evolution toward a service economy in the 1970s and '80s, however, more women started working between college and marriage, earning a level of expendable income that was entirely new.

Many realized, as a friend of Kitahira puts it, that "money buys more than a Chanel suit."

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