"Female leaders tend to be more talented individuals, female leaders are better suited to do apparel retail business, and I expect to see more female leaders in business management," Yanai told CNN Business. “Women have a better ability to adapt when getting into the global market."
This would be cause for celebration were it not for the fact that the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report of 2018 ranked Japan 110th out 149 countries. And according to the 2018 annual “Women in Business” study by Grant Thornton International, only five percent of senior roles in corporate Japan were held by women. This is despite an all-time high of 70% of working-age women holding jobs.
Women are much more likely to be hired for part-time or dead-end clerical track work. The managerial career track is primarily filled by men because it is assumed that women will quit when they have children. Some indeed do, but others are pushed out or pressured to leave.
The deep-seated Japanese belief that women should be home raising the children is underscored by a recent scandal involving eight medical universities that were rigging their admissions against women. Their justification? The conviction that women would leave the medical profession when they started a family.
Nevertheless, increasing numbers of women are being seen in even the top-tiered companies. These are companies that hire from the best universities, offer lifetime employment, and pay high salaries, but expect employees to log eighty-hour weeks. Many positions have been newly vacated by the large number of retiring baby boomers.
The problem, however, is that few of these secure, high-paying jobs are being filled by women. In addition to the long work hours, these jobs often have overseas assignments causing another challenge to married women with families or husbands with secure but inflexible jobs.
Women warriors fighting their way up the ladder in these companies will probably have to choose between a family or their career when the time comes. Others, though, are increasingly managing to juggle both thanks to government support, and, of course, the practical need for two incomes to pay for the expensive educations their children will need to get those eighty-hour-a-week jobs.
Also see: Women in Japan
