{"id":34619,"date":"2014-04-13T09:04:44","date_gmt":"2014-04-13T13:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=34619"},"modified":"2014-04-13T09:11:27","modified_gmt":"2014-04-13T13:11:27","slug":"wit-life-267-japans-underutilized-female-resources","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2014\/04\/13\/wit-life-267-japans-underutilized-female-resources\/","title":{"rendered":"WIT Life #267: Japan’s underutilized female resources"},"content":{"rendered":"

WIT Life <\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator <\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>Stacy Smith<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>(Kumamo<\/a><\/strong><\/em>to-ken<\/a> CIR, 2000-<\/strong><\/em>03).\u00a0 <\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>She starts<\/strong><\/em> her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she sha<\/strong><\/em>r<\/strong><\/em>es some of the interesting tidbits and <\/strong><\/em>t<\/strong><\/em>r<\/strong><\/em>ends along with h<\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>er own observations.<\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Early this month\u00a0I attended a Japan Society event<\/a> regarding empowering women in the U.S. and Japan.\u00a0 The featured speakers were former Diet member,\u00a0Minister of the Environment and Minister of Foreign Affairs Yoriko\u00a0Kawaguchi, and Morgan Stanley Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat.\u00a0 The conversation was\u00a0moderated\u00a0by\u00a0Columbia Professor of History\u00a0Carol Gluck, a Japanologist who has written several books on Japanese history.\u00a0\u00a0Some of the topics to be addressed were\u00a0gender\u00a0disparity issues, using quota systems to increase numbers\u00a0of women executives\u00a0and work-life balance, so it was guaranteed to be an interesting discussion.<\/p>\n

Kawaguchi pointed out that\u00a0a mentality change on the part of both employers and women themselves is needed.\u00a0\u00a0M\"kate_hesson_juggles_work_and_family__1610129638[1]\"<\/a>any Japanese women strive for nothing more than having a happy, healthy family, not even conceiving that they could reach the\u00a0levels of upper management.\u00a0 Of course, this\u00a0creates a chicken and egg scenario as there are few female\u00a0role\u00a0models in these positions so they don’t have\u00a0many predecessors in\u00a0whose footsteps they can follow.\u00a0 Porat remaked that when she started out\u00a0there were few female managers\u00a0she could look up to, but credited her advancement partially to male superiors who\u00a0recognized her skills\u00a0and took a chance on her.\u00a0 Kawaguchi stressed that there is a\u00a0significant pipeline of women with the potential to move into executive positions in Japan in the future.<\/p>\n

One of the most obvious solutions for getting more women into the work force is improving child care\u00a0options, which\u00a0is essential to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plan to\u00a0bring stay-at-home moms back to work to\u00a0help relieve\u00a0Japan’s chronic employment shortage.\u00a0\u00a0He officially set the goal of having more than 30 percent of executive positions be occupied by women by the year 2020, also calling for every Japanese company to have at least one female executive.\u00a0 Gluck’s blunt comment regarding this lofty goal was, “Good luck with that!”\u00a0 Currently, women hold just 1.6%\u00a0of executive roles at Japanese public companies, and only 15 percent of its companies meet the one female executive requirement.\u00a0 Obstacles to having Japanese women enter the workplace are largely cultural, as this article<\/a>\u00a0succinctly details.\u00a0 It is clear that a sea change is needed in Japan to even come close to reaching this\u00a0target of Abe’s Womenomics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03).\u00a0 She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends along with her own observations. Early this month\u00a0I attended a Japan Society event regarding empowering women in the U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[53,18,36,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-translatinginterpreting","category-wit-life","category-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-90n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34619"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34636,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34619\/revisions\/34636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}