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An office lady (), often abbreviated OL (, ), is a female office worker in Japan who performs generally pink-collar tasks such as secretary or clerk work. Office ladies are usually Full-time job permanent staff, although the jobs they perform usually have relatively little opportunity for promotion, and there is usually the tacit expectation that they leave their jobs once they get married.
Due to some Japanese pop culture influence in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the term is also in common usage there. However, the meaning of the word is slightly different. The term is also sometimes seen in Anglophone countries.
In the 1980s, being an OL was the most common job for Japanese women, and OLs made up approximately one-third of the female work force.
OL are frequently found in josei manga and anime, often portrayed as attractive, clever, and individuals bored with their jobs, over-pressured by their families, and facing psychological issues.
OLs were expected to leave the company after they married. The employers, therefore, are reluctant to spend extra money to train OLs.
However, many OLs are content with their position and wages in the company because a great number of them live with their parents and do not have to worry about their daily expenses. Thus, they can spend all their salaries on travelling or luxury goods. - Read online, registration required
It is noteworthy that almost one third of all female employees in 1995 had clerical jobs; most of them were OLs. But the proportion is much smaller for males: only 15 percent of all employed males had clerical jobs. Although many women work in offices, they still have many fewer opportunities for promotion than males. Only 1% of female employees are managers or officials; in contrast, this figure is almost one-seventh for males.
The word doki is used to describe the relationship between those who enter the company in the same year or have the same length of tenure. If two employees are doki, they are assumed to have equal position. Similarly, senpai (one's senior) and kohai (one's junior) are also commonly used to show the hierarchy in Japanese companies.
A junior female employee has to use polite terms such as desu and masu when she speaks to her senpai. Senpai, on the other hand, can speak casually with their kohai.
If tenure is the only standard that determines one's position in the group as well as in the company, everything will be straightforward. However, the difference in education that OLs receive causes tension between them. OLs who are college graduates may have higher official ranks than those who are high school graduates, even if the latter have longer tenure.
Sometimes, due to the difference in their education, a kohai may have a higher official rank, as well as wage, than their senpai. As a result, the kohai is unwilling to be deferential to their senpai, while the senpai feels it unfair that they receive lower pay. In her 1998 book , author Yuko Ogasawara argues that if OLs do not get along with each other in the workplace, they cannot unite together to fight against gender discrimination.
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