Women stay inside the house and take care of the children, and their husbands work and make money outside of the house.
This Confucian/traditional role of taking care of children is slowly being challenged, but it is deeply imbedded in the culture. One of the common words for wife even has the kanji for house in it (家内) and the one of the words for husband has the kanji for master in it (主人). Master is 主 (or lord/chief/main thing... Japanese has many meanings for each word) and house is 家. Since the 1970s, this view of women and the limitations of this view has slowly been improving and allowing for more change. Even with laws passing, women are still discriminated against in every field. When the labor minister of your country says that high heels are necessary at work, you know there's something not quite right.
For years, Japan has been implementing policies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (1972). Since then, it has been revised twice to target discrimination in promotion, recruitment, and hiring (1997), and to focus on making employers responsible for eliminating sexual harrasment in the workplace (2005-6). There has been a lot of criticism for this law because Japan's goal by 2020 was to have women in 30% of managerial positions. In reality, it has only increased to 15% of management in businesses and 9% in the government sector. The gender wage gap is still really big, but it went from 32.8% in 2005 to 25.7% in 2017. Year by year the acceptance of women in the workplace is improving.
