Monday 19 October 2009

Womenomics

Recently the executive director of Unifem, the United Nations Development Fund for Women visited Australia. The director, Ines Alberdi discussed with Australian women the inertia surrounding the deteriorating level of women in senior positions. She stated that there are broadly similar problems in developed countries but in nations such as Rwanda there is still a fight to get women into higher education. In her native Spain as here and in Australia, women are well represented in academia but not many are climbing the ranks of business. Historically the path to equality was thought to be education but in Western societies where women are well educated we still don’t occupy senior roles to any great degree.

Consider these points relating to women’s roles in Japan.
One of the longest-running discrimination cases in Japan concerns six women. They were forced to work as secretaries and watch as men who joined the company at the same time with the same backgrounds went on to become managers. The case has run for 14 years.
• Shintaro Ishihara, the Governor of Tokyo, once told a women’s magazine that women who had lived beyond their ability to produce children were of no use to society.
• There are no female chief executives of Japan’s largest 225 companies listed in the Nikkei Index.
• In one case of workplace discrimination in Japan it was found that a woman would have to work for 32 years at the same company to earn the same as a man who had been there for six years if the two did exactly the same job.
• Only 9.4 percent of parliamentary seats are held by women, ranking Japan 131st in political participation out of 189 countries.
• Only 2.5 percent of professional posts in science departments across national universities were occupied by women.

Unifem should encourage companies to adopt the mandate Norwegians enjoy; organisations are required to have 40:60 per cent ratio of one gender.

As I’ve said before, if Lehman Brothers were Lehman Sisters the worst of the recent financial crisis could well have been mitigated – or even avoided.

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