Japan’s long campaign to appoint more women to senior roles in business and industry has suffered a blow after a survey found that just 13 chief executive officers at the country’s top companies are female.
Women lead just 0.8% of the 1,643 firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s top-tier prime market, according to a survey by the Kyodo news agency, which based its findings on fiscal 2023 financial statements.
Kyodo said the figures demonstrated Japan’s slow progress in “increasing diversity among its corporate decision makers”.
The low numbers underline the uphill struggle Japan’s government faces in reaching its target of having women in at least 30% of executive roles by the end of the decade.
The proportion of senior women in business remains low even under the government’s wider definition of “executive”, which includes corporate officers, as well as directors, auditors and executive officers.
A decade after the then prime minister, Shinzo Abe, told the UN general assembly he would “create a society in which all women shine”, Japan continues to fare badly in international gender comparisons of politics and business.
According to a 2022 OECD survey, women held just 15.5% of executive positions in Japan, compared with 40.9% in Britain and 45.2% in France. Only China and South Korea had a smaller proportion of female executives.
Other reports paint a similar picture. Last year an Economist survey placed Japan 27th out of 29 developed economies in its “glass-ceiling index”.
Women have, though, been appointed to several prominent positions in recent years, and the Kyodo survey found that the number of female board members exceeded 3,000 – double the number five years ago.
In January, Mitsuko Tottori, a former flight attendant, became the first female president of Japan Airlines, and in July the government appointed Naomi Unemoto as the first female prosecutor-general. In 2021, Tomoko Yoshino became the first female president of Rengo, Japan’s biggest trades union organisation.
New polls indicating that Sanae Takaichi, the economic security minister, is among the three candidates expected to be in the running in a 27 September vote for leader of the governing Liberal Democratic party (LDP), has raised the prospect that Japan could soon have its first female prime minister.
Takaichi, a conservative who opposes same-sex marriage and separate surnames for married couples, enjoys strong support among LDP supporters, but she is less popular among her colleagues.
Party lawmakers and rank-and-file members will both have a say in choosing the new leader, who is then expected to be approved as prime minister in the LDP-dominated parliament.
