An anonymous Japanese blogger’s tirade about failing to secure a day care place for her child has spurred Prime Minister Shinzo Abe into action.

In a Feb. 15 blog post titled “I couldn’t get day care — die Japan!!!” a person claiming to be a mother said she was preparing to quit her job as she had nowhere to leave her child. “So what am I supposed to do now?” she wrote, using unusually coarse language in the post shared about 50,000 times on social media. “Give me a damn break Japan.”

After initially brushing off the post, Abe has promised remedies. On Friday, he pledged to add detailed measures in legislation this spring to reduce waiting lists for day care — the figure climbed to 23,167 last April. The same day, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which he heads, set up a task force to propose fixes, and the head of Komeito, his coalition partner, suggested using extra budget to this end.

“Applications for nursery schools have increased at a pace faster than we can provide places for,” Abe said during a session of the Diet on Monday in response to one of a raft of questions throughout the day on the issue. “We will do our utmost to cut waiting lists to zero so that people can both work and raise children.”

Grappling with an aging and shrinking population, Abe has made boosting women’s participation in the workforce a pillar of his economic policies. He may have decided to take action to stem a sagging support rate among women — 37 percent compared with 47 percent for men in a Mainichi newspaper poll this month — ahead of the Upper House election this summer, said Mari Miura, a professor of gender and politics at Sophia University in Tokyo.

“It’s clear that Abe has little understanding of the hardships faced by working women,” Miura said. “The LDP is scrambling to ensure that this issue doesn’t blow up before the elections.”

Long waiting lists at publicly run day care centers have forced many mothers to stay at home, and made women hesitant about switching jobs due to concerns they may lose places for their children. Baby-sitters aren’t widely available — and are very expensive.

“While the number of day care facilities has increased, there are also more working women,” said Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. “Given how quickly the working population is projected to decrease, we need to ensure that people who want to work, but currently can’t due to child care issues, can actually work.”

Unleashing the labor of that population would mean big gains for the workforce. Last year, 950,000 women cited childbirth and child care as reasons why they weren’t searching for a job, even though they had a desire to work.

When first questioned about the blog post in the Diet on Feb. 29 by opposition lawmaker and working mother Shiori Yamao, Abe refused to address the issue, saying the anonymous nature of the post meant he “couldn’t verify the content.” That struck a nerve with working parents on Twitter, where people who sympathized with the blogger used a hashtag saying: “It was me who was rejected from day care.” The response to the blog spurred a protest outside the Diet on March 5.

Nearly 30,000 people have signed a petition on change.org for the government to reduce waiting lists by improving working conditions for day care workers — a separate blog highlighting the sector’s meager pay was also picked up by the mainstream media. A day care worker makes about ¥214,200 ($1,880) per month, compared with the average across sectors of ¥325,600.

Legislation to raise salary subsidies may help attract more workers to the industry or at least stop people from quitting. A survey of 31,550 child-care workers conducted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government between 2008 and 2013 showed 1 in 5 workers was considering quitting, citing low pay as the top reason.