Survey finds 13 female CEOs among top 1,600 Japanese enterprises

Survey finds 13 female CEOs among top 1,600 Japanese enterprises

A study found that only 13 CEOs at Japan’s top companies are women. This is terrible news for the country’s long-running effort to get more women into top business and industry positions.

The Kyodo news agency surveyed the top-tier prime market on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and found that women lead only 0.8% of the 1,643 companies listed there. The poll was based on financial records from fiscal 2023.

Kyodo said the numbers showed that Japan was progressing slowly in “increasing diversity among its corporate decision-makers.”

The low numbers show how hard it will be for Japan’s government to meet its goal of having women in at least 30% of senior positions by the end of the decade.

Even though the government’s meaning of “executive” includes corporate officers, directors, accountants, and executive officers, the number of top women in business is still low.

Shinzo Abe, then prime minister, told the UN General Assembly that he would “create a society in which all women shine.” Ten years later, Japan still performs poorly in politics and business compared to other countries.

A 2022 study by the OECD found that only 15.5% of senior jobs in Japan were held by women. In Britain and France, that number was 40.9% and 45.2%, respectively. Only China and South Korea had fewer female leaders than the U.S.

Similar things have been said in other accounts. Last year, The Economist ranked Japan 27th out of 29 developed economies in the “glass-ceiling index.”

However, women have been assigned several vital roles in the past few years. According to the Kyodo poll, more than 3,000 women are on boards, which is twice as many as there were five years ago.

Mitsuko Tottori, a former flight attendant, became the first woman president of Japan Airlines in January. In July, the government named Naomi Unemoto the country’s first female prosecutor-general. Tomoko Yoshino was the first woman to lead Rengo, Japan’s largest trade union organization, in 2021.

New polls show that Sanae Takaichi, the minister of economic security, is one of the three likely candidates to be in the running for leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on September 27. This makes it more likely that Japan will soon have its first female prime minister.

Takaichi is a conservative who is against same-sex marriage and partners having different last names after they get married. She has much support from LDP followers but not as much from her peers.

Lawmakers and regular party members will both be able to choose the new leader. The government will likely accept the new leader as prime minister, which the LDP controls.

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