Shoko Kawata just became the first mayor in Japan’s history to stay in office while becoming a mother. She arranged for a deputy to cover her maternity leave, without resigning and without apologizing. That was enough to set off a national debate, complete with commentators who found it “inappropriate” for an elected official to step away from her duties for a few months. Kawata summed it up with disarming simplicity: Institutions could adapt, but people change far more slowly, and she cannot turn herself into a man.
Japan has a word for what she is up against: matahara, a contraction of “maternity harassment.” It covers everything done to pregnant employees and new mothers at work—pressure to resign, demotions upon return from leave, projects reassigned, managers who treat a pregnancy as a personal betrayal. The word is so widely used that it belongs to the everyday vocabulary of Japanese working life.
The Japanese have a real talent for coining words that stick, and workplace culture has given them plenty of material. There is karoshi, or death from overwork, officially recognized and compensated by the state since the 1980s. In the late 2010s, they coined the word KuToo to refer to the movement against mandatory high heels at work, a triple pun on kutsu (shoe), kutsū (pain), and #MeToo. When a phenomenon is common enough to deserve its own word, it says a lot about what’s expected from workers. Give us your life. Be a pretty employee or else . . . and choose between your job and a child.
There’s a paradox. Japan desperately needs children. In 2025, its fertility rate fell to 1.14 children per woman, a historic low and the 10th consecutive year of decline. In Tokyo, the rate has dropped below one child per woman. Deaths have outnumbered births for 19 straight years. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi calls it a “silent emergency.” Yet women’s labor force participation still follows the same curve it has for decades: It climbs after graduation, then collapses at marriage or first birth. A country with a vital need for babies keeps structurally punishing the women who have them.
Americans might be tempted to read this as an exotic story about a faraway work culture. They shouldn’t.
America’s fertility rate is falling too, and mothers are being pushed out of work
The U.S. general fertility rate fell to 53.1 births per 1,000 women of reproductive age in 2025, another record low, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate has declined 23% since 2007. The total fertility rate now sits below 1.6 children per woman, far under the 2.1 needed for population stability. About 3.6 million babies were born last year, and immigration restrictions mean there is less demographic slack to compensate.
Meanwhile, American mothers are leaving the workforce at a pace not seen in decades. More than 400,000 women exited the U.S. labor force in the first half of 2025, according to a University of Kansas analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the steepest decline in over 40 years for mothers of young children. Labor force participation among mothers with children younger than 5 fell nearly 3 percentage points between January and June 2025. A KPMG analysis found the sharpest drop among college-educated mothers of very young children, whose participation slid from close to 80% in 2023 to about 77%. Fathers’ participation rose slightly over the same period.
In all likelihood, childcare is the main driver. Already scarce, it is getting scarcer. The average price of care reached $13,184 per year in 2025, and 46% of American children under 6 live in a licensed childcare desert. Meanwhile, immigration raids have shrunk the workforce, Head Start funding is flat despite inflation, and the July 2025 budget legislation cuts deeply into Medicaid, which covers about 40% of U.S. births.
Return-to-office mandates did the rest: The share of Fortune 500 companies requiring full-time office attendance nearly doubled in 2025, from 13% to 24%. The pandemic-era flexibility that had pushed women’s labor force participation to record highs in 2023 has been methodically dismantled, and mothers absorbed the shock.
The earnings consequences are well documented. In their landmark cross-country study of child penalties, economists Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and their coauthors found that American mothers lose roughly 30% of their earnings in the long run after a first birth, while fathers lose essentially nothing. That penalty compounds over a career, into lower savings, lower Social Security benefits, and a wider gender gap at every subsequent stage.
Medals will not produce babies
Against this alarming backdrop, the administration’s answer has been rhetoric. President Trump has called himself the “fertilization president.” Congress created $1,000 “Trump Accounts” for newborns; a $5,000 baby bonus has been floated, along with a proposed National Medal of Motherhood for women with six or more children. At the White House, a wave of high-profile pregnancies among senior figures has been presented as proof of a family-friendly administration. Katie Miller declared that the most radical thing a woman can do is embrace her “biological destiny.”
The message behind all this is clear: Women should stay home and have children. The problem is that this model has already been tested, and it fails. Cash bonuses and honorary medals have a poor track record everywhere they have substituted for infrastructure. The demographic evidence points in the opposite direction: The countries that resist fertility decline best are those where women can combine careers and children without penalty. France long illustrated this relative advantage over Japan and Germany, where the motherhood penalty reaches 62% of lost earnings and two-thirds of mothers work part-time. And indeed, U.S. federal statistics show the pronatalist push has not moved the needle: Fertility hit a new historic low in 2025.
Japan spent three decades proving that a country cannot harass its mothers into having more babies. It even gave us the vocabulary. A nation that wants children must first accept that mothers must be allowed to remain full workers, with professional ambition and full incomes. The fact that one mayor taking maternity leave still makes national news, in Japan or anywhere else, is a measure of how far we have to go.
