Photograph of the Prime Minister delivering an address
”Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attended the Executive Women Symposium Reception held in Tokyo.
Photograph of the Prime Minister delivering an address
”Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attended the Executive Women Symposium Reception held in Tokyo.
Ian Wright, founder of NonExecutiveDirectors.com, urges women to have the confidence to go for board-level positions, because diversity improves how effective a business is.
Paula Loop, Leader of PwC’s Governance Insights Center
And what it will take to change things
Excerpt: As of the last full year end for the 3,678 companies in the PacificData database, there were 4,267 Independent Directors or 10.6% of the total number of Directors. The total number of female Directors was just 966 or 2.4% of the total – well below even the 9.5% ratio of female members of Japan’s House of Representatives.
Statistics defined (p.3)
Total companies analyzed: The company sample size for each country profile.
Percentage of board seats held by women: Calculated by dividing the number of board seats held by women by the total number of board seats in a given sample. The same logic applies for the percentage of board chairs that are women and for the statistics provided for committees.
Former trailblazing dean Christina Ahmadjian finds her balance between the classroom and boardroom By Kris Kosaka, June 21, 2015
Christina Ahmadjian, an academic and expert in corporate governance, sits on the boards of several Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Japan Exchange Group, the holding company that oversees the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Often the lone foreigner and only woman in the room, Ahmadjian relishes playing gadfly and applying her research to real-life situations.
George Olcott, a guest professor at the Faculty of Commerce at Keio University and an outside directorat Hitachi Chemical and Denso Corporation, gave a speech on this topic at the recent Columbia Business School CJEB conference on corporate governance in Japan.
The global discussion about gender diversity on public company boards continues. Despite practices in several countries like the adoption of quotas, and significant efforts undertaken by a number of organizations in the US to increase gender diversity of directors, the number of women serving as directors has not changed significantly over the last six years. (18% of all S&P 500 directors are now female compared to 16% in 20081.