Japan: 30% Of Top Executives To Be Women By 2030

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Facts

  • On Thursday, Japanese PM Fumio Kishida announced plans to increase the number of top women executives in the country’s major companies to at least 30% by the end of the decade.1
  • At a meeting on gender equality held this week, Kishida said, “We seek to have the ratio of women among executives at 30% or more by 2030 in companies that are listed on the Tokyo stock exchange’s prime market.”2
  • The announcement comes as Japan is set to host the G7 leaders’ summit in Hiroshima next month. The country ranks 116 out of 146 in the 2022 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report — the lowest among the G7 nations.2
  • Among all the G7 nations, Japan also has the widest gender pay gap, with women earning around 25% as much as men for full-time work, according to a report by Statistics Bureau of Japan published earlier this month.3
  • According to a cabinet office survey, women represented only 11.4% of top executives in major companies on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2022.4
  • The country, which unveiled the same goal in 2003 to be achieved by 2020, lags behind other countries regarding corporate gender equality. Women in the US reportedly hold 40% of managerial roles and more than 30% in the UK and France.5

Sources: 1Guardian, 2Firstpost, 3BNN, 4South China Morning Post, and 5Kyodo News+.

Narratives

  • Left narrative, as provided by DW. As the vast majority of Japanese citizens now recognize that women face institutionalized discrimination, both the public and private sectors must realize the importance of including women in the upper echelons of society. Japan is still tied to its traditional views of gender roles, so if it wants to tap into the potential political and economic benefits of inclusion, it must train its corporate and government entities to accept that equality is the route to success.
  • Right narrative, as provided by Knowledge at Wharton. Despite the claims made in unserious, non-peer-reviewed studies, gender diversity on corporate boards has virtually no positive impact on company success, nor does it have a negative effect. Forcing women into executive positions to fill a quota will, at the very most, lead to no significant change. This trend is proven true in both the corporate world and other sectors, where women, like men, are hired for their experiences and accomplishments rather than their gender.

Predictions