Four Figures and the Column They All Need
Japan asks an employer of any size above a hundred people to look at four things before writing a plan about women at work: how many of the people it hired were women, how the length of service differs between men and women, what the working hours look like, and what proportion of the managers are women. Three of those four this product can already compute from records it holds. The fourth is not a calculation problem. It is a column that does not exist, and there is a reasonable argument that it should not exist by default — which makes the interesting question not whether to add it, but how.
What the Act names, and what it hands off
The Act on the Promotion of Women's Active Engagement in Professional Life sets two obligations that stack. Article 8 makes an employer with over a hundred regularly employed workers formulate a general employer action plan, notify the ministry of it, publicise it internally and externally, and re-notify on every modification. The plan itself is short — a planning period, the goals, and the initiatives with their timing — but Article 8(3) puts a condition in front of it: before you may write the plan you must ascertain and analyse the state of women's participation in your own business, and the Act names four measures for that. Then the second sentence of the same paragraph does the thing that turns this from a policy exercise into a data problem. The goals <em>must be quantitatively prescribed</em>, using those same figures.
Article 20 then adds publication. Over three hundred regularly employed workers and you must regularly publicise both of two categories of information: achievements in providing opportunities to women workers you employ or intend to employ, and achievements in developing an employment environment that helps people balance work and home. Between a hundred and three hundred and you must publicise at least one of the two. At a hundred or fewer, both Article 8 and Article 20 become endeavour obligations rather than duties.
What this post deliberately does not tell you
The Act names the two categories and then hands the actual list of publishable items to an Order of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare — the phrase "pursuant to the provisions of Order of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare" appears in almost every paragraph quoted above. That Order is where the specific figures live, and it is not in the translation we read. The Ministry of Justice database also records this translation's last version as Act No. 24 of 2019, and it says plainly that its translations are not official texts. So: get the current item list from MHLW, not from us, and not from an English summary. What follows is about the four measures the Act itself names, which is a structural question and does not move when the ordinance does.
Three of the four are already in the data
Take the four measures one at a time against what an organization running this product actually holds. The employee record carries a hire date and an end date, a department, a position, a manager, an employment type and an employment status. Attendance records carry a date, a clock-in, a clock-out, hours worked and whether the shift crossed midnight, and a month can be locked as a timesheet period. Employees, attendance, leave and payroll are each available as report datasets, so the aggregation side is a report rather than a build.
The four measures against what this product holds
| What Article 8(3) asks you to ascertain | The underlying data exists | Computable as a figure | Splittable by gender |
|---|---|---|---|
| The proportion of women among the workers you hired | Yes | Yes | No |
| The difference in years of continuous service | Yes | Yes | No |
| The state of working hours | Yes | Yes | No |
| The proportion of women in managerial positions | Partly — configurable by you | Partly — configurable by you | No |
| A quantitative goal expressed in the same figures | Yes | Partly — configurable by you | No |
Built and maintained Configurable by you, not maintained by us Not built
The first column is almost entirely green, which is the point: a hire cohort is a date range on hire_date, continuous service is a subtraction, and working hours are what the attendance and timesheet records are for. The third column is uniformly red for one reason, and it is the same reason in every row. The fourth row is the odd one, and it is odd for a reason that has nothing to do with gender.
What "managerial" means in a database
The fourth measure asks for the ratio of women among workers in managerial positions. That sentence contains a category which the schema can answer in two different ways, and the two select different people.
Two readings of "managerial", from the same records
This is the sort of thing that decides a published percentage and never appears in the published percentage. Whichever reading you take, the useful discipline is to write it down beside the figure — because the following year somebody else will compute it, and the two definitions differ by exactly the people an organization argues about.
Three of these four figures are arithmetic over records you already keep. The fourth is a question about what a word means. None of them can be produced at all without one column nobody added.
A dimension you can add today, and the reason to add it carefully
There is no gender field on an employee in this product, and no date of birth either. That is not an oversight we are apologising for — a personnel schema that ships demographic columns by default is making a decision on behalf of every organization that installs it, in every jurisdiction, including the ones where holding the field is itself the problem. But an organization with a statutory reason to hold it should be able to, and should be able to hold it as the sensitive thing it is rather than as another text box.
That part is built. Custom fields are available on the employee record and reach the web, the API, reports, exports and the workflow engine. They carry their own permissions, separate from ordinary employee access: one to view sensitive values and one to export custom-field data at all. A value can be stored masked, and the masking has two strategies — bullets throughout, or bullets with the last four characters left visible. On the reporting side there is a second, independent layer: a field on a table can be marked sensitive and, separately, export-restricted, so a figure can be readable on screen and refused in a download, with the refusal written to the audit log as a blocked export rather than as an empty column.
Two governance layers, and what each one is for
On the record
Custom fields, per module
- A field defined once for the employee record, reaching web, API, reports, exports and workflows
- A separate permission to see values marked sensitive
- A separate permission to export custom-field data at all
- Masked storage, either fully or with the last four characters shown
- Values reportable and exportable alongside the built-in employee fields
On the report
Field settings, per organization
- A per-field setting on a named table, unique per organization
- Hide the field from the report builder entirely
- Mark the field sensitive
- Restrict export independently of visibility, so it reads on screen and refuses to download
- A blocked export written to the audit trail with its own event name
The two layers answer different questions. The first is "may this person see this value on this record"; the second is "may this figure leave the building in a spreadsheet". A demographic dimension wants both, and it wants them set before the first value is entered rather than after somebody notices the export.
What neither layer does is aggregate-level protection. Marking a field sensitive governs the field; it does not decide whether a count of three people in one department should be published as three. That judgement is the employer's and it belongs beside the figure, not in a checkbox.
A hire cohort
Every employee carries a hire date and an end date, so who joined in a period and who is still there is a date range.
Length of continuous service
Derived from the same two dates, per person, with an employment status to say whether the service is current.
The state of working hours
Attendance records carry hours worked per day with clock times and a midnight-crossing flag, and a month can be locked as a timesheet period.
Employees, attendance, leave and payroll as report datasets
Each is available to the report builder, so the aggregation is a saved report rather than a development task.
A sensitive field with its own view and export permissions
Custom fields on the employee record carry masking and two permissions of their own, and a report field can be marked export-restricted with the refusal audited.
A demographic dimension on the employee record
Gender is addable today as a sensitive custom field; as a first-class column with its own vocabulary and its own reporting treatment it would be an addition.
A declared definition of a managerial position
A position carries a free-text grade and an employee carries a manager, so rank and span of control are both inferable and neither is stated.
A published figure that carries its own definition
A statutory ratio is only comparable year on year if the population it was computed over travels with it.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Hire and end dates on every employee, with an employment status, so a joiner cohort and a length of service are both date arithmetic.
- Attendance records with hours worked, clock times, a midnight-crossing flag and a source, plus a month that can be locked as a timesheet period.
- Employees, attendance, leave and payroll as report datasets, so a statutory ratio is a saved report rather than a build.
- Custom fields on the employee record, reaching the web, the API, reports, exports and the workflow engine.
- Two permissions of their own for sensitive custom fields — one to see the values, one to export custom-field data at all — separate from ordinary access to the employee record.
- Masked storage in two strategies, either bullets throughout or bullets with the last four characters visible.
- Per-field report governance, where a field on a table can be hidden, marked sensitive, or export-restricted independently — and a blocked export is written to the audit trail under its own event name.
More we can add to your workspace
- A demographic dimension as a first-class field on the employee record, with its own vocabulary, its own reporting treatment and a place to record why the organization holds it.
- A declared definition of a managerial position, so a ratio computed over managers means the same population this year and next.
- A position grade as a controlled, ordered vocabulary, rather than an optional string beside the title.
- A ratio that carries its definition with it, so a published figure states the population it was computed over.
- Aggregate-level protection on a published figure, so a cell covering very few people can be suppressed on a rule rather than on somebody noticing.
- A record of workers considered but not hired, which some jurisdictions ask for even though this Act asks about those actually taken on.
- A statutory report pack for Japan, assembling these figures into the shape the ministry expects and keeping the year's numbers alongside the plan they support.
Where we point you to a specialist
- We will not put a demographic field on the employee record for everybody by default. The organizations using this product operate in jurisdictions that take opposite positions on holding that data, and shipping the column would make the decision for all of them at once. Our position is that it should be a deliberate act by an organization with a reason, recorded as sensitive from the first value, and that is why the sensitive-field machinery came first and the field did not.
- We will not tell you whether you are over the threshold. "Regularly employed workers" is a term the Act uses and the ministry interprets, and headcount questions of that kind turn on fixed-term staff, secondments and group structure in ways a row count does not settle. A Japanese labour adviser owns that, and it decides whether you have a duty, an endeavour obligation, or neither.
- We will not present a computed ratio as the published figure. The Act requires the goals to be quantitative and the ministry order decides what gets published in what form; between those two sits a set of definitional choices — who counts as a manager, which leavers count, how a part-year hire is treated — that are yours to make and to defend. We will compute what you define, show the population it came from, and keep the definition beside the number.
The second and fourth items are the ones we would do first and they are small: a declared definition of a managerial population, and a figure that carries that definition when it is exported. The first is a schema decision rather than a day of work, and the conversation worth having is about vocabulary and about who may read it, both of which the existing sensitive-field layer already answers. The fifth is a rule and a threshold. The seventh is the largest and should follow the current ministry item list rather than lead it, which is a reason to start with the four measures the Act itself names.
What we can build for Japan on top of the standard product
Everything listed above as something we can add describes what ships in the standard product today — it is a starting point for Japan, not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do there. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine are in the product because Kenyan clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself. The same door is open here. If rounding at the currency's own precision, consumption tax subtotalled per rate, a registration number field, a bank or mobile money feed, a statutory return format, a rule specific to how your operation runs, or a link to a system you already have is what stands between you and a decision, tell us and we will scope it as a build — written spec, timeline and price — before you commit to anything.
The arithmetic before the document
Japan is the market where our own arithmetic is the first thing to fix rather than a field we are missing. The invoice, quotation and point-of-sale paths round money to two decimal places as a hardcoded literal, and the yen has no minor unit — so a three-line invoice at the standard rate produces a consumption tax of ¥423.4, an amount that cannot be invoiced or paid. We already hold the correct number of places for every currency as reference data; that code simply does not read it. On top of that sits the requirement that gives the fix its shape: a qualified invoice must show consumption tax categorized by tax rate, and the rounding is permitted once per rate rather than once per document. Our invoice carries a single tax figure with the rate on the line, so the per-rate subtotal in between does not exist — and it is the same piece of work as the rounding, which is why we would build them together rather than in sequence. Separately and smaller: a tax registration number on the organization, on customers and on suppliers, since no column for one exists anywhere today.
Banks, payments and a currency with no decimals
Bank statement feeds and local payment rails wired into the Payments Register, with documents raised and reported in yen at the precision the yen actually has. What we will not do is treat our copy of the public register of qualified invoice issuers as authoritative for your credit entitlement — we will hold the number you recorded and the date you checked it, and leave the checking where it belongs.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
Payroll and statutory returns
A Japanese payroll engine with income tax withholding, the standard-remuneration social insurance grades and the year-end adjustment, computed on live employee records rather than rebuilt in a spreadsheet each December.
Systems you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. No roadmap slide, and no pretending in a demo that something exists when it does not.
Tell us what you need integratedOur take
If you employ over a hundred people in Japan, the analysis this Act asks for in front of a plan is mostly a reporting exercise over records you already keep — a hire cohort, a length of service, a set of working hours. What stops it is one dimension, and the honest position is that we do not ship that dimension and think we are right not to. Add it as a sensitive custom field with its own view and export permissions, decide in writing what a managerial position means before you compute the fourth ratio, and get the current publishable item list from the ministry rather than from any English source including this one. The part we would build for you is the smaller half: a stated definition attached to a published ratio, so next year's figure is comparable with this year's.
Four questions for a system that will hold a demographic dimension
Is there a gender field on the employee record?
What you will probably hear
Yes, of course.
How to read it
Then ask what happens to it in a jurisdiction where you must not hold it, and whether it can be turned off rather than left blank. A field that ships everywhere has made a decision for everybody. The better answer is that it can be added deliberately and is sensitive from the first value.
Can a figure be readable on screen and refused in an export?
What you will probably hear
Access is by role, so if they can see it they can export it.
How to read it
Those are two different questions and most systems answer only the first. Ask whether the refusal is recorded, because an export that silently returns an empty column and an export that is blocked and logged are very different things when somebody asks later.
Who counts as a manager in your reporting?
What you will probably hear
People with the manager role, or people with direct reports.
How to read it
Both are defensible and they select different people. Ask which one the system uses, whether it is configurable, and whether the choice travels with the figure. A ratio without its population is not comparable with last year's.
What happens when a breakdown covers three people?
What you will probably hear
It shows three.
How to read it
Correct for an internal report and a problem for a published one. Ask whether a minimum cell size can be enforced as a rule rather than left to whoever is preparing the file, because the person preparing the file is under time pressure and is not thinking about re-identification.
Tell us which figures you have to publish
If your obligation is a small set of ratios computed over your own staff records, the work is rarely the arithmetic — it is deciding the population and keeping that decision attached to the number. We can build the datasets, the definition and the governance around the export; the definitional calls are yours and a local adviser's, and we would rather say so than hand you a percentage.
Talk to us about your workspace