Japanese businesswomen need more than a place at the table

Many companies focus on appearances rather than better management

Over the past decade, waves of corporate governance reform have relentlessly pressured the Japanese business world to increase the ratio of women in senior corporate leadership roles.

As of last year, women held 9.1% of the board seats and senior corporate and auditing positions at Japanese listed companies, up from 1.6% in 2012, according to figures compiled by the Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office.

While the upward curve is generally encouraging as a sign of greater gender diversity at work, Japan’s two corporate camps both merit a closer look: the majority that satisfies itself with a “diversity of optics,” treating women in senior roles as window dressing to satisfy compliance requirements, and the minority that embraces a “diversity of substance,” leveraging women’s perspectives to improve the workings of management.

The diversity of optics, while marginally beneficial for motivating the next generation of young women — you must see women in management to believe it is possible — treats females as ornamental and thus does little to improve the quality of management.

Only by empowering smart and vocal women can gender diversity contribute to better senior-level conversations. Unfortunately, there are still many cases of companies that aim for nothing higher than optical diversity.

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When my friend in a senior corporate position was asked if she could recommend a few female candidates to join the board of her top client as nonexecutive directors, she was delighted. Carefully combing through her Rolodex, she put together an impressive shortlist, confident that it would not disappoint her client.

But it did. Weeks later, when she followed up on her referrals, the client’s chief executive admitted that none of those interviewed quite matched what his management was looking for. Careful prying by my friend revealed the truth: “These ladies are all too fired up,” the CEO said.

Too motivated, these would-be women directors did not fit the bill for the client. In the end, the company was looking for no more than the window-dressing form of gender diversity. But that CEO is not alone in appreciating diversity only at an optical level.

Women, because of their minority status in business, can bring fresh dimensions to an otherwise homogenous group of businessmen. Less encumbered by the mainstream expectations placed upon their male counterparts, I have seen many women in professional positions experience career detours, including years spent overseas or pursuing interests outside of work.

When such differences are interpreted as alarming foreignness worthy of exclusion to maintain conventional harmony, we lose the benefit of diversity of substance.

Ironically, men also lose out by refusing to embrace a diversity of substance.

A former deputy prefectural governor, now in her 60s, recently told me how the male governor she served under secretly discouraged others from promoting her at external events or from meeting locals, despite her readily implementable ideas such as developing local talent using her network.

“It was abundantly clear that I was never going to run for the governor’s office and threaten his position,” she mused. “If he let me be, I would be openly praising him for his generous leadership, which could only be positive for him.”

But the governor’s zero-sum mentality — believing that any positive limelight she enjoyed would be his loss — clouded his vision. He simply wanted her to be present, he indicated, “as a symbol.”

It is tempting to belittle this narrow-mindedness as petty insecurity. But the outcome of such subconscious zero-sum calculation is not to be underestimated.

In South Korea, there has been a violent backlash against feminism from some young men who equate women’s advancement with a loss of their perceived entitlement. In the Western world, a similar mindset can play out racially in the form of xenophobia toward immigrants.

The urge to neutralize minorities who stick out is innate and strong. So much so that I have seen men, competitive with one another by default, suddenly band together to sabotage a smart and vocal woman. That is why we must design conscious organizational countermeasures.

At the workplace, formal mentorships for junior and mid-ranking women are a well-known recipe for promoting gender diversity. While a good match can work wonders, too often, mentorships can take on the character of obligatory sessions based on an employer’s arbitrary assignment, much like an additional mandatory diversity training meeting.

My best mentor was an invisible hand. Someone higher in the organization who takes a genuine interest in guiding a younger woman’s career can shield her from hostility or jealousy at the workplace or at least help her to strategize better. A stealth mentoring program, where matches are not publicized, could be a way to experiment with institutionalizing such a mechanism.

For any woman who has swum against the tide for too long, I advise looking for an exit and trying new waters before you are washed ashore. The prime time of one’s career is too short to put up with an environment that underappreciates one’s worth. Otherwise, self-doubt can eventually result in a career death spiral.

Fortunately, there are as many, if not more, men who embrace the diversity of substance as those who do not. The trick is to find an environment with a majority who do.

The old business adage, “You cannot manage what you cannot measure,” can partly explain the overemphasis on a diversity of appearances. Numerical yardsticks, such as the number of women in managerial positions or on a company’s board, are certainly useful for measuring gender equity outcomes.

But we must remember that even more meaningful is a diversity of substance, which can be a true enabler of quality discussions and innovation. Blasting past the numbers game, we must appreciate the different perspectives offered by minorities, such as women in business in the case of Japan.

Even with a healthy ratio of women on a board as nonexecutive directors, a thin pipeline of senior in-house female executives should sound an alarm bell for investors and management alike to investigate further. It is time we got past obsessing over diversity just in appearance and take an honest look at ourselves through the lens of diversity of substance.

This article was originally published by Nikkei Asia on March 27th, 2023.