By RYOKO TAKAHASHI/ Staff Writer
May 13, 2024 at 18:16 JST
The woman who filed the lawsuit speaks during a meeting in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward on Jan. 29. (Sawa Okabayashi)
The Tokyo District Court on May 13 ruled that a company’s housing system, which offers substantially better benefits to “career-track” employees, discriminates against women.
The lawsuit was filed by a woman who works at AGC Green-Tech Co., a subsidiary of AGC Inc., which is a major glass manufacturer formerly called Asahi Glass Co.
The woman claimed that she was subjected to gender discrimination by the company’s housing and wages policy based on the idea that “sogo-shoku” (career-track positions) are for men and “ippan-shoku” (general positions) are for women.
The court ordered AGC Green-Tech to pay a total of 3.78 million yen ($24,250) to the woman, who is a general position employee.
“There is no rational reason for limiting the company housing system to career-track employees,” the court said in the ruling.
The court found that the situation “constitutes indirect discrimination” under the Equal Employment Opportunity Law and that “it is illegal for the company to continue to operate the company housing system without correcting the indirect discrimination.”
According to the complaint and other documents, the Tokyo-based company’s career-track positions are almost exclusively occupied by men, while the general positions are almost exclusively held by women.
The company’s system for treating rental housing as company housing applies only to career-track employees, for whom the company pays up to 80 percent of the rent.
Meanwhile, general position employees are only entitled to a 3,000-yen housing allowance, and the disparity could sometimes be about 24-fold.
The woman claimed that effectively changing the disposition of a benefit, in this case housing compensation, based on gender is a violation of the law.
The company argued, “There is no fact that we classify general positions as female and career-track positions as male,” and that the housing system “is part of our recruitment strategy that differentiates us from other companies.”
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