"Olympig" creative campaign with plus-sized model Naomi Watanabe. An Olympic chief who resigned after making sexist remarks about women. "Olympig" creative campaign with plus-sized model Naomi Watanabe. An Olympic chief who resigned after making sexist remarks about women.
As of 2020, only 15% of senior and leadership posts were held by women, according to the Global Gender Report. And with only 14% of seats in Japan's parliament occupied by women, and most lawmakers aged between 50 to 70, male boomers dominate political and business life in the country. "We are sharing information on online platforms such as Instagram because we want young people to make their voices heard and their votes count," said Nojo.From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, Japan turned its economy around. Powered by male white-collar workers, the country became the world's second-largest economy after the United States.
Mori and Nikkai both said women should remain silent. Choo says their disparaging remarks toward women were examples of traditional and outdated views on the place of women in society, which suggest men should remain the primary breadwinners and women should stay home. For instance, over the past decades, Japan has seen a dramatic increase in part-time and temporary employment — due, in part, to the partial legalization of temporary and contract work in 1986 and full legalization in 1999.
Government plans to put women in 30% of senior management roles by 2020 across the workforce were quietly pushed back to 2030 last year, after it proved too ambitious. But it's not always easy to shift the mindsets that bind people to traditional gender roles in Japan, according to Nobuko Kobayashi, a partner with EY-Parthenon, a strategic consulting group within E&Y Transaction Advisory Services.
The large user-base has resulted in a plugged-in generation of younger Japanese like Nojo, the student activist, who are airing their grievances online and holding those in power accountable for their actions and words. In recent years, campaigns such as #MeToo and #KuToo — which saw women petition against wearing high heels to work — have put Japan's gender inequality and human rights issues in the spotlight, even though the movements failed to garner as much support in the country as they did in the West.