In January, when JAL Group, the mother or father firm of Japan Airways, named Mitsuko Tottori its subsequent CEO, international media hailed the appointment as a victory for gender equality. Tottori, 59, is the primary feminine chief govt within the service’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 ladies and commenced 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 Trade, solely 15 had been led by ladies, or lower than 1%, based on a January 2023 report by credit score analysis agency Teikoku Databank. On Japanese boards, ladies occupy 13% of the seats on the change’s prime market firms, in contrast with 32% and 33% respectively for companies listed on the U.S.’s Nasdaq and New York Inventory Trade, 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 World 500, simply 28 are run by ladies. However the gender hole yawns particularly huge in Asia, the place solely 4 World 500 firms—Chinese language on-line retailer JD.com, Indonesian oil and gasoline big Pertamina, Korea Gasoline, and Chinese language electronics parts producer Luxshare Precision Business—have ladies CEOs.
Make no mistake: Asia has an abundance of gifted feminine enterprise leaders. Fortune’s new Most Highly effective Girls Asia record 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 virtually 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 proportion 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 Improvement 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 proportion of girls administrators stays beneath 20%, based on a 2023 survey by Deloitte.
The area’s authorities and enterprise leaders are shifting, slowly, to create extra alternatives for ladies. 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 specific targets for enhancing the share of feminine administrators. And the patriarchs of Asia’s largest family-owned companies appear more and more prepared to move the reins to daughters, not simply sons.
Tan Su Shan, who subsequent March will develop 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 ladies leaders fluctuate drastically from financial system to financial system. Contemplate China, which faces the challenges of an getting older, shrinking workforce, and has each motive to encourage extra ladies to work and be a 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 ladies. 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 govt 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 govt 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 girl CEO of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), which runs the monetary hub’s bourse, is main a high-profile marketing campaign to influence the two,600 firms traded on the change to forswear single-gender boards. In 2022, the change’s itemizing committee, which Chan then headed, introduced that every one firms on the change can be required to incorporate each women and men on their boards by the tip 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 might be difficult. Among the many holdouts are China’s state-owned firms, whose administrators are usually appointed by the State-Owned Property Supervision and Administration Fee, a Beijing oversight physique. However information revealed by David Webb, an activist investor based mostly in Hong Kong, means that the most important Hong Kong–listed Chinese language SOEs (state-owned enterprises) have lately added ladies administrators.
Roughly 19% of the administrators of Hong Kong–listed firms are ladies. The Hong Kong Trade 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 obligatory. “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 enhance actual range. Amongst Tokyo-listed companies, 30% of girls administrators sit on a couple of board, double the share of males, based on 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 Improvement, has set a purpose of boosting the proportion 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 range if the lens is widened to incorporate all 700 firms on the Singapore Inventory Trade. At these firms, solely 16% of administrators are ladies, and 38% had all-male boards, based on 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 record).
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 delivery, with ladies anticipated to stay house and lift kids. In August, Singapore introduced that it could enhance government-paid parental go away to 30 weeks by 2026, up from 20 weeks presently. 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 financial 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 delivery charges, and a long-standing aversion to immigrant labor. Japan’s overwhelmingly male authorities and enterprise leaders know ladies will need to have a higher function within the office if Japan’s financial system is to outlive, a lot much less thrive. However the Japanese expertise underscores how difficult it may be for firms to appropriate gender imbalances even when there’s 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 ladies 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 financial 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 finest hope for revival was rising the labor provide by getting extra ladies to work and making it simpler for them to stability the obligations of labor and elevating kids. Japan, she calculated, may increase GDP development to 2.5% from 2.3% by rising 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 latest insurance policies to enhance parental-leave advantages, develop entry to day care, and mandate equal pay for equal work. Companies must develop into extra family-friendly and promote extra ladies to administration roles.
Japan overshot Matsui’s goal—by a mile. Coverage-makers and companies regularly 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 element of his financial coverage platform. Within the years since, Japanese authorities have dramatically expanded subsidies and tax breaks for households with kids and elevated the variety of childcare facilities. Japanese dad and mom are actually entitled to take 180 days of parental go away 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 document 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, based on 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, based on the OECD, the widest pay hole amongst any of the Group of Seven economies. In its 2024 World Gender Hole report, the World Financial Discussion board ranked Japan 118 out of 146 international locations.
And whereas extra ladies are working, there was no comparable enhance within the variety of ladies in Japanese boardrooms. In June of final 12 months, the Japanese authorities set a goal for ladies to make up no less than 30% of prime-market listed firm boards by 2030. Extra lately 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. Overseas funds together with Goldman Sachs Asset Administration and Norway’s big sovereign wealth fund have declared they may 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 ways complain companies needs to be free to rent leaders on benefit and expertise with out regard to gender. However Tottori’s appointment suggests Japan has loads of gifted ladies leaders who’ve been missed. In 1985, when she joined the aviation trade, ladies weren’t thought-about for govt roles at huge firms like JAL, which was based in 1951 as a state-owned service earlier than changing 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 metamorphosis 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 model of Japanese feminine govt, one who arrived within the C-suite via an unconventional path, Makiko Ono is likely to be the premier instance of a lady rising via dogged willpower.
Maybe Japan’s most high-profile girl enterprise chief, Ono is CEO of Suntory Beverage and Meals, the nonalcoholic division of drinks big Suntory Holdings. With $11 billion in income, accounting for 54% of group gross sales, SB&F is the most important listed Japanese firm with a feminine CEO. Ono joined the mergers and acquisitions group of Suntory in 1982 after finding out Portuguese at Tokyo College. Considered one of her first tasks was the agency’s profitable bid for the Château Lagrange vineyard in Bordeaux. Later, when Ono requested to be transferred to France to study extra in regards to 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 concentrate on the corporate’s wine enterprise, changing 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 develop into the advertising director for Häagen-Dazs Japan, wherein 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 instructed Japanese media that she won’t have risen to management if she had married and had kids. However she boasts that now 100% of SB&F feminine staff who give delivery return to work.
That’s a constructive 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 steer.
This text seems within the October/November 2024 problem of Fortune with the headline “A slow ascent to the top.”
