Status of Women Leaders in Japan: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Japan has been struggling to increase women’s participation in leadership roles despite Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s womenomics initiative, which supports more Japanese women in leadership positions to overcome a labor shortage and a rapidly aging population (Office of the Prime Minister, 2014). In the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report (2020), Japan ranked 131st of 153 countries based on women’s participation in management positions. The gender ratio of management positions is men 85.2 and women 14.8. According to the Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office (2017), in Japan, women represent only 3.5% of senior government jobs and 9.2% of the corporate sector’s directorlevel positions. As a result of the low number of women in leadership positions, in 2017, the government reset the goal of hiring women in leadership position by downgrading from 30 to 7% in the government sector and from 30 to 15% to the private sector by 2020(Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office 2017). as of june 2018 proportiion of women in managerial positions of private companies with over 100 employees is 11.2% (Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office, 2020a)