The Real Reason Biden Asked Japanese Women if Their Husbands Like Them ‘Working Full-Time’

Earlier this week, dozens of political website from BuzzFeed to Breitbart, including this one, picked up a 20 second video clip from Joe Biden’s trip to Japan that featured the vice president asking a group of women, “Do your husbands like you working full-time?”

The line played like a classic Biden gaffe and made for especially good fodder on conservative websites that like to beat up on the vice president. It turns out there was a good reason for Biden’s question.

The vice president was visiting an internet company in Shibuya called DeNA specifically to participate in a roundtable discussion about the challenges Japanese women face in the workplace. But while our own Tommy Christopher included the context necessary to understand why Biden said what he did, many other media organizations simply played the “gaffe” for laughs.

One news outlet that decided to correct the record and apologize for airing Biden’s words out of context was CNN. Jake Tapper issued the correction during The Lead on Friday, saying of Biden, “I tried to make the point that despite his substantive work, the media perhaps too often focuses on his gaffes.” He continued:

“In doing so, I did him and you the exact same ill service by not providing the proper context for a quick sound bite we aired. The vice president had been attending an event in Japan aimed at highlighting efforts to reduce the percentage of Japanese women currently at 60%, who quit their jobs after the birth of their first child, an important context for you to have known before we showed you the vice president asking some female workers there how their husbands like them working full-time. Again, we were trying to make the point the VP deserved a more fair shake but then I inadvertently ironically, perhaps hypocritically, did the same thing. I regret the error and apologize to the vice president and to you, the viewer.”

According to the English-language Japan Times, while 70% of women have jobs before they get married, more than 60% quit those jobs after they have their first child. As Tapper noted, given the context of Biden’s remarks, they were perhaps not as inappropriate as he and other media outlets made them out to be.

Watch video below, via CNN:

And watch the original clip of Biden’s out-of-context soundbite below:

[photo via screengrab]

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