Women Comprise 16% of Executives in Japan's Top-Listed Firms, Report Reveals

The Japanese premier business lobby recently conducted a survey that revealed women filled 16.1 percent of the executive roles in the country's top-listed companies. These increased significantly by 2.8 percentage points from the year before. This number marks a major milestone toward the realization of the ambitious goal of at least 30 percent female representation in key leadership positions set by the government by 2030. Furthermore, in this new corporate landscape, this emerging momentum for diversity by gender will guarantee a brighter view for women in business.

While the total percentage is more than the previous years, female employees promoted to board member positions remain unacceptably low at 3.4%, accounting for fewer than 300 persons. This underscores an urgent call for companies to upscale training and development programs designed to upgrade female employees into high-ranking positions. Keidanren officials pointed out that mentoring systems among other human resource development strategies should also be put in place to assist the promotion of women into leadership positions.

Meanwhile, an independent survey revealed that external board members composed of women already accounted for 33.1 percent, which also includes the assumed roles by legal and financial experts. The listed companies that did not have a single female executive have since dwindled to become substantially fewer from 200 to 69. And women already comprise at least 30 percent of the executives in 138 companies.

To obtain the contemplated 2030 figure, the government anticipates that the portion of women in executive jobs in the firms whose stocks are listed on the Prime Market to rise from the current 4.4% of female executives to 19% by 2025 with the goal that no firms will not have any female executive by that time. This is being spurred by the growing attention of institutional investors to the requirement for gender representation at management levels. According to the study, commissioned by Keidanren and conducted by the Japan Research Institute, among the 716 firms that are federation members, the ratio of female executives rose to 16.8% from 14.1 points.