In January, when JAL Group, the mother or father firm of Japan Airways, named Mitsuko Tottori its subsequent CEO, world media hailed the appointment as a victory for gender equality. Tottori, 59, is the primary feminine chief government within the provider’s 73-year historical past. Not like her male predecessors, a lot of whom graduated from elite Tokyo College, Tottori attended a little-known junior school for girls and started her profession as a flight attendant.
But when Tottori’s ascent is a breakthrough for Japanese ladies, in one other sense, its novelty highlights the extraordinary sturdiness of Japan’s glass ceiling. Of the 1,836 firms listed on the top-tier “prime” part of the Tokyo Inventory Change, solely 15 had been led by ladies, or lower than 1%, in line with a January 2023 report by credit score analysis agency Teikoku Databank. On Japanese boards, ladies occupy 13% of the seats on the trade’s prime market firms, in contrast with 32% and 33% respectively for companies listed on the U.S.’s Nasdaq and New York Inventory Change, and 40% at firms buying and selling on European exchanges.
Girls are underrepresented in boardrooms the world over. Of the companies ranked on this 12 months’s Fortune International 500, simply 28 are run by ladies. However the gender hole yawns particularly broad in Asia, the place solely 4 International 500 firms—Chinese language on-line retailer JD.com, Indonesian oil and fuel large Pertamina, Korea Gasoline, and Chinese language electronics parts producer Luxshare Precision Business—have ladies CEOs.
Make no mistake: Asia has an abundance of proficient feminine enterprise leaders. Fortune’s new Most Highly effective Girls Asia listing acknowledges 100 of them, chosen from a roster of executives and entrepreneurs that will get deeper yearly.
And but Asian companies lag Western counterparts by nearly each significant measure of gender equality, together with workforce participation, seniority, pay, and board illustration. In China and India, the area’s two largest economies, the share of girls within the workforce has declined steadily because the Nineteen Nineties. South Korea and Japan have among the many highest gender pay gaps of Group for Financial Cooperation and Growth nations. And whereas Malaysia leads the area in gender equality on company boards, with ladies accounting for 28.5% of administrators and matching the worldwide common, in Asia’s different main economies the share of girls administrators stays under 20%, in line with a 2023 survey by Deloitte.
The area’s authorities and enterprise leaders are shifting, slowly, to create extra alternatives for girls. Japan has succeeded in dramatically boosting the variety of ladies within the workforce. Inventory markets in Asia’s three largest monetary hubs—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo—have set express targets for enhancing the share of feminine administrators. And the patriarchs of Asia’s largest family-owned companies appear more and more keen to cross the reins to daughters, not simply sons.
Tan Su Shan, who subsequent March will change into the primary feminine CEO of DBS Group, a Singapore-based financial institution that’s Southeast Asia’s largest lender, sees trigger for optimism now that previous prejudices about ladies in enterprise are lastly fading. “It’s a great time to be a woman leader in Asia,” she declares.
However the image is complicated, and prospects for girls leaders fluctuate significantly from economic system to economic system. Think about China, which faces the challenges of an growing older, shrinking workforce, and has each motive to encourage extra ladies to work and be part of the manager ranks. Equality of the sexes is enshrined in China’s structure, and an oft-cited revolutionary slogan holds that “women hold up half the sky.” However present Chinese language management has emphasised a return to conventional roles for girls. At an October assembly of the All-China Girls’s Federation, Chinese language president Xi Jinping exhorted delegates to “actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture.” A current report by Bain & Co. in collaboration with government search agency Spencer Stuart discovered that, though Chinese language women and men start their careers “on similar starting lines” based mostly on training and workforce participation, “only a small percentage of women in China reach the executive ranks … and very few become CEOs.” The report discovered that ladies maintain solely about 19% of government seats in China. A majority of girls surveyed by authors of the report stated their households didn’t perceive their profession ambitions, whereas their employers did not assist them in managing household duties.
In Hong Kong, Bonnie Chan, the primary lady CEO of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), which runs the monetary hub’s bourse, is main a high-profile marketing campaign to steer the two,600 firms traded on the trade to forswear single-gender boards. In 2022, the trade’s itemizing committee, which Chan then headed, introduced that every one firms on the trade could be required to incorporate each women and men on their boards by the top of 2024. The push appears to be getting traction: Chan says that as of August, the variety of listed firms with single-gender boards has fallen to fewer than 350, down from 800 two years in the past, and regardless of the lengthy odds, she says she has a “high level of confidence” that every one companies will adjust to the brand new rule by year-end.
HKEX hasn’t introduced penalties for firms that miss the deadline, however Chan warns there will probably be penalties. Failure to heed the single-gender-board ban, she says, will probably be handled “no differently than a breach of compliance for other mandatory rules. A letter will be sent to the company asking for an explanation. The listing committee will decide on actions to be taken.”
A showdown could possibly be tough. Among the many holdouts are China’s state-owned firms, whose administrators are usually appointed by the State-Owned Belongings Supervision and Administration Fee, a Beijing oversight physique. However knowledge revealed by David Webb, an activist investor based mostly in Hong Kong, means that the biggest Hong Kong–listed Chinese language SOEs (state-owned enterprises) have not too long ago added ladies administrators.
Roughly 19% of the administrators of Hong Kong–listed firms are ladies. The Hong Kong Change hasn’t set a compulsory quota for the share of girls administrators on the boards of listed companies; Chan doesn’t suppose that will probably be essential. “I hope everyone will appreciate that this genuinely adds value,” she says.
One danger is “overboarding,” the place the identical ladies sit on a number of boards, which improves numbers however doesn’t improve actual variety. Amongst Tokyo-listed companies, 30% of girls administrators sit on multiple board, double the share of males, in line with Reuters.
“It’s a great time to be a woman leader in Asia.”
Tan Su Shan, deputy CEO, DBS Financial institution, Singapore
Singapore, too, eschews formal quotas in favor of voluntary targets. The Council for Board Variety (CBD), an advisory physique established by the city-state’s Ministry of Social and Household Growth, has set a purpose of boosting the share of feminine administrators at Singapore’s 100 largest firms past 30% by 2030, up from 23.7% in 2023. Singapore fares much less favorably in board variety if the lens is widened to incorporate all 700 firms on the Singapore Inventory Change. At these firms, solely 16% of administrators are ladies, and 38% had all-male boards, in line with the CBD. Notably, although, Singapore’s Oversea-Chinese language Banking Corp., which with revenues of $18 billion is Southeast Asia’s third-largest lender, is led by Helen Wong (No. 2 on this 12 months’s MPW Asia listing).
Tan argues that ladies in Singapore start their careers with many benefits over males. Amongst youthful staff, extra ladies than males have school levels, and males are required to carry out two years of army service. However usually the tables are turned after ladies give beginning, with ladies anticipated to stay residence and lift youngsters. In August, Singapore introduced that it could improve government-paid parental depart to 30 weeks by 2026, up from 20 weeks at the moment. The federal government additionally moved final 12 months to legalize egg freezing, a measure Tan, a former member of parliament, has advocated for greater than a decade.
No Asian economic system has grappled with gender equality extra arduously than Japan, a nation vexed by the world’s oldest workforce, among the many world’s lowest beginning charges, and a long-standing aversion to immigrant labor. Japan’s overwhelmingly male authorities and enterprise leaders know ladies will need to have a better function within the office if Japan’s economic system is to outlive, a lot much less thrive. However the Japanese expertise underscores how difficult it may be for firms to right gender imbalances even when there may be broad consensus that doing so is an existential crucial, not only a matter of social justice.
“In Japan today, the feeling is that everyone understands the ‘why’” for creating extra alternatives for girls within the office, says Tokyo-based enterprise investor Kathy Matsui. “But everyone still struggles with the ‘how.’”
Matsui, previously vice chair of Goldman Sachs Japan, has been explaining the “why” since 1999 when she coauthored a analysis report that coined the time period “womenomics.” Japan’s once-booming economic system had languished for a decade within the wake of a inventory and property collapse. Matsui, a Japanese American educated at Harvard, argued that Japan’s greatest hope for revival was growing the labor provide by getting extra ladies to work and making it simpler for them to steadiness the tasks of labor and elevating youngsters. Japan, she calculated, may enhance GDP progress to 2.5% from 2.3% by growing Japan’s feminine labor participation ratio to 59%, the U.S. degree, up from the nation’s then-prevailing charge of fifty%.
To realize that purpose, Matsui suggested, Japan’s authorities would want to introduce a raft of recent insurance policies to enhance parental-leave advantages, develop entry to day care, and mandate equal pay for equal work. Companies must change into extra family-friendly and promote extra ladies to administration roles.
Japan overshot Matsui’s goal—by a mile. Coverage-makers and companies step by step embraced the logic of accelerating the function of girls within the labor market. Then in 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cited Matsui in explicitly endorsing “womenomics” as a key part of his financial coverage platform. Within the years since, Japanese authorities have dramatically expanded subsidies and tax breaks for households with youngsters and elevated the variety of childcare facilities. Japanese dad and mom are actually entitled to take 180 days of parental depart at two-thirds of month-to-month pay.
Thousands and thousands of Japanese ladies went to work. For girls in prime working years, these between the ages of 25 and 54, Japan’s feminine labor participation charge has surged to a file excessive of 83%, in contrast with 77% for the U.S. Japan’s workforce is rising now at the same time as its inhabitants continues to shrink.
However by different metrics, Japan stays a laggard on gender equality. Greater than half of girls in Japan’s workforce maintain part-time jobs, in line with Japan’s Ministry of Well being, Labor, and Welfare—and even these with full-time positions maintain extra junior roles and earn considerably lower than their male counterparts. Girls in Japan earn 22% lower than males, in line with the OECD, the widest pay hole amongst any of the Group of Seven economies. In its 2024 International Gender Hole report, the World Financial Discussion board ranked Japan 118 out of 146 nations.
And whereas extra ladies are working, there was no comparable improve within the variety of ladies in Japanese boardrooms. In June of final 12 months, the Japanese authorities set a goal for girls to make up at the very least 30% of prime-market listed firm boards by 2030. Extra not too long ago the federal government moved to require companies with greater than 300 staff, each listed and unlisted, to reveal the share of girls they make use of in administration positions regularly. Traders, too, are turning up the stress. International funds together with Goldman Sachs Asset Administration and Norway’s large sovereign wealth fund have declared they are going to vote towards board nominations of Japanese firms with out ladies administrators. Japan’s Nomura Asset Administration has vowed to do likewise.
Courtesy of HKEX
Critics of such techniques complain companies ought to be free to rent leaders on benefit and expertise with out regard to gender. However Tottori’s appointment suggests Japan has loads of proficient ladies leaders who’ve been ignored. In 1985, when she joined the aviation trade, ladies weren’t thought-about for government roles at massive firms like JAL, which was based in 1951 as a state-owned provider earlier than turning into impartial in 1987. When the corporate went bankrupt in 2010, the federal government recruited a maverick, Kyocera founder Kazuo Inamori, to show issues round. Inamori—who lamented in a 2012 BBC interview that the corporate had misplaced contact with prospects—led a change of JAL’s company tradition and aggressively promoted frontline operators over bureaucrats. Tottori was chief buyer officer earlier than she was promoted to the highest job.
If Tottori represents a brand new type of Japanese feminine government, one who arrived within the C-suite via an unconventional path, Makiko Ono could be the premier instance of a lady rising via dogged willpower.
Maybe Japan’s most high-profile lady enterprise chief, Ono is CEO of Suntory Beverage and Meals, the nonalcoholic division of drinks large Suntory Holdings. With $11 billion in income, accounting for 54% of group gross sales, SB&F is the biggest listed Japanese firm with a feminine CEO. Ono joined the mergers and acquisitions staff of Suntory in 1982 after finding out Portuguese at Tokyo College. Certainly one of her first initiatives was the agency’s profitable bid for the Château Lagrange vineyard in Bordeaux. Later, when Ono requested to be transferred to France to be taught extra concerning the wine enterprise and search for different funding alternatives for the group, the HR division turned her down. In its 80-year historical past, the corporate had by no means posted a feminine worker exterior Japan.
However Ono waited for the world to show. In 1991, she was transferred to Suntory France to give attention to the corporate’s wine enterprise, turning into the corporate’s first feminine expat. She helped Suntory forge partnerships with Britain’s Lucozade and Ribena, and later with French soda maker Orangina. In 1997, Ono returned to Tokyo to change into the advertising and marketing director for Häagen-Dazs Japan, by which Suntory has a 40% stake. After a stint as Suntory Holdings chief sustainability officer, Ono was chosen as SB&F CEO in 2023.
Ono is single and has informed Japanese media that she may not have risen to management if she had married and had youngsters. However she boasts that now 100% of SB&F feminine workers who give beginning return to work.
That’s a optimistic instance for companies all through the area. The problem now, for Suntory and different Asian firms, is to make sure that as soon as these ladies return to work, they’ve an equal probability to guide.
This text seems within the October/November 2024 difficulty of Fortune with the headline “A slow ascent to the top.”
