| Isabel Reynolds, Yuki Hagiwara & Monami Yui |
As an ambitious graduate from an elite university, Kyoko Fukushima was aiming for the top when she got a job at one of Japan’s big trading houses – often working late into the night alongside her male colleagues. Ten years and two kids later, she found her responsibilities downgraded to paper shuffling, so she resigned.
Now there’s growing pressure on Japan’s corporations to stop pushing working mothers like her to the sidelines and instead help them develop their careers. A new law that came into effect last month will lay bare just how hard a task lies ahead. It requires large employers to publish statistics on their numbers of female employees and managers, along with plans for promoting them, complete with targets and time frames.
For Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who’s faced with a shrinking labour force and is opposed to a large influx of immigrant workers, keeping women at work is an economic imperative. While the number of women in employment has risen since he took office, many hold part-time and contract positions. He’s set to announce a new package of family policies in May, but his previously announced target of having 30 per cent of managers in all sectors be women by 2020 remains a long way off.
“I don’t know of a single company where women are able to perform on the same basis as men,” said Kimie Iwata, who worked as a senior bureaucrat and as an executive at cosmetics company Shiseido Co before taking up her current position heading the Japan Institute for Women’s Empowerment and Diversity Management. “I look at all sorts of companies, and I can say that with confidence about Japan.”
About 9.2 per cent of managers in the private sector were women as of 2014, according to a December report by the government’s Gender Equality Bureau. In the US, women make up 25 per cent of senior managers, according to a report last year by the Center for American Progress. Recognising that reaching the 30 per cent target by 2020 is unlikely, the Japanese government recently revised downward its goal to 15 per cent for the private sector and 12 per cent for the national government.
Women at Honda make up just seven per cent of the work force and 0.7 per cent of management. “The women I speak to really value their careers and want to get ahead,” says Mutsuko Kogo, Honda’s general manager for diversity and inclusion
Iwata says companies need to drastically improve efficiency in order to help women balance work with family: hold shorter meetings, allow work from home and flexible hours, and rethink the system of the largest companies transferring employees around the country or overseas every few years, she said.
Encouraging women into leadership positions is proving difficult, even for companies seen as enlightened in terms of family policies. Shiseido, whose work force is 83 per cent female, was showered with public criticism after changing direction in 2014 to have beauty consultants with small children work their share of late and weekend shifts. These are the busiest and most profitable times for the company’s makeup counters in stores.
A television programme on the changes broadcast last year set off what became known as the ‘Shiseido shock’, with many on social media criticising what they saw as a backward step for working women and some even vowing to stop buying the company’s products.
The head of Shiseido’s human resources department, Yuki Honda, who made her own way up the ladder while raising two children, said women’s careers depend on their own ability to put in effort to meet the company’s needs. She added that the company’s shift in policy was to encourage female employees to seek promotion opportunities.
“We had to tell them that being away from the sales floor at the busiest times would be negative for their careers,” Honda said.
Shiseido is planning to increase the percentage of female managers to 30 per cent this year from 27.2 per cent last year, she said.
By contrast, women at automaker Honda make up just seven per cent of the work force and 0.7 per cent of management – figures the company has said it struggles to increase, partly because of a shortage of women in science and engineering. It’s aiming to triple the number of female managers by 2020.
“The women I speak to really value their careers and want to get ahead,” said Mutsuko Kogo, general manager for diversity and inclusion at Honda. “But there is a tendency to try to lighten their burden out of kindness. It’s an unconscious bias.” – Text & Photos by Bloomberg
The post New law to reveal how women struggle at Japan’s big corporations appeared first on Borneo Bulletin Online.