Women’s Empowerment and Changes in Japanese-Style Management

Abstract
The Japanese government led by Shinzo Abe has stressed that active participation of women in management is central to economic growth. This study examines numerous gender equality activities in Japanese workplaces that reflect recent changes in Japanese-style management. The primary focus of this paper is on the establishment of numerical targets to increase the number of women managers, in particular examining the processes undertaken by the Coalition for Advancing Women in Fukuoka, a forerunner of promoting active women participation in Japan, in attaining its organizational goals. The Coalition for Advancing Women in Fukuoka has found that setting numerical targets for women managers may well be a successful strategy for raising company awareness of the abilities of women, which is presently not employed due to gender-based personnel management practices.

About the Speaker
Tomoko Komagawa is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Hokkaido University. Her research focuses on gender relations in the workplace, and some of her recent work examines the way in which personnel management in the financial industry in particular, a representative industry for Japanese-style management practices, institutionalizes and reproduces career gaps between men and women. Her most recent article “Gender-based job segregation and gender gap in career formation: Focusing on bank clerical staff since the postwar years” was published in Japan Labor Review (2016).