COLLINS: Japan has eclipsed the U.S. on working women? Really?

Japan now has a higher proportion of working women than we do. I’m trying to get my head around this fact.

“Everyone else is continuing to rise and we’ve declined, and now we’re basically tied with Japan. And Japan’s on the upswing and we’re still going down,” said Jason Furman, chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. He was pointing to a chart that shows women in the labor force in 24 countries. These are the usual suspects when we’re comparing ourselves to other societies—Australia, Belgium, Canada, etc.

“When it came to women in the workplace, the United States used to be seventh. And now we’re 20th,” said Furman in a phone interview.

Stick with me for a minute on this. We spend half of our national debate time talking about how economically fragile Americans feel. Why do you think that is? Well, there’s the whopping disproportion of national wealth flowing into the pockets of the already-wealthy. And the plummeting power of labor unions.

But women’s falling out of the workforce is also a huge deal. It reduces family standards of living and puts a crimp in the economy.

And why do you think this is happening? One of the reasons is clearly, positively, absolutely the cost of child care.

It’s incredible that we’ve built a society that relies on women in the labor force, yet makes no discernible effort to deal with this problem. The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, recently divided the country into 618 “family budget areas” and determined that, in more than 500 of them, the cost of child care for a family with a 4-year-old and an 8-year-old would exceed housing costs. Also, if you’re a working single mother with those same two children in, say, Buffalo, New York, child care probably eats up a third of your income.

And infant care is impossible. In most states, infant care is more expensive than college tuition.

I am going to take a huge leap of faith and say that Japan is not trying to bring its mothers into the workforce because of its historic commitment to feminism. (Last year, when a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly made a speech calling for more services for women, she was taunted with cries of, “Get married!” and, “Can’t you even bear a child?”)

But the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is convinced that encouraging working women will stimulate the economy. Now Japan, where 64 percent of working-age women are employed, compared with 63 percent in the United States, is creating 400,000 new prekindergarten spaces.

Japan also guarantees that mothers get 58 weeks of maternity leave, about half of it paid.

During a debate, Hillary Clinton laced into Carly Fiorina’s argument that government shouldn’t “dictate to the private sector” about family leave. “They don’t mind having big government to interfere with a woman’s right to choose and to try to take down Planned Parenthood. They’re fine with big government when it comes to that. I’m sick of it,” Clinton said. It was really one of her better moments.

You may be stunned to hear that, while the Republicans talk endlessly about ginning up the U.S. economy, the idea of helping working mothers stay in the labor force does not come up all that often. Although Ben Carson has described preschool as “indoctrination.”

Wow, nothing’s changed.•

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Collins is a New York Times columnist. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.