TOKYO -- For the first time in five decades, over half of Japan's women were employed in 2018, new data showed Friday, amid a worsening labor shortage and continuing efforts to accommodate working mothers.
The country had 29.46 million women at work, or 51.3% of the total, up 870,000 from a year earlier, according to a labor force survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The growth was nearly double the 450,000-person increase in working men.
