Intersections of gender and immigrant status in Japan: Analysis of the 2020 Basic Survey on Wage Structure

Economic integration of immigrants reflects a stratified structure of the receiving country’s labor market. Gender is one of the most important factors stratifying the labor market. While the intersection of gender and immigrant status in the labor market has been examined, a possibility that immigration policies intervene in it is understudied. This study examines how Japan’s restrictive immigration policies intervene in the gender wage gap by analyzing data from the 2020 Basic Survey on Wage Structure. Results show different gender wage gaps among immigrants according to their visa type. While those with job-related visas experience smaller wage disparity with their male counterparts than do Japanese women, those with status-based visas experience equally large wage disparity. Application of the decomposition method revealed that the large gender wage gap among status-based immigrants is caused by higher return to age for men than for women and different distributions of occupations by gender. While the constraints imposed by restrictive immigration policies on labor immigrants regarding their work mitigate the differential treatment of men and women, the gendered structure of the Japanese labor market maintains itself in the long-run through the process of integrating immigrants.