Women in Leadership Roles Remain Scarce in Japan

Japan spectacularly missed its goal of filling 30 percent of managerial position with women by 2020. Only 7.8 percent of these positions were held by females this year, up 0.1 percent from 2019. The failure had been some years in the making, as numbers from an annual survey by Teikoku Databank show.

The number of Japanese women in managerial positions has been growing only extremely slowly over the course of the last couple of years. The coronavirus pandemic, which hit Asia in early 2020, slowed 2020 growth down even more.

7.5 percent of companies surveyed had in fact reached the 30 percent threshold, with the best-performing sectors being retail, real estate, the service industry and finance. Since 2016, upwards of 40 percent of companies said they were “aggressively” hiring and appointing women to higher positions. Yet, results have not manifested themselves.