Women in management in Japan

Name: Women in management in Japan
Creator: Corpus

share of managers who are women

The share of management positions held by women, as disclosed by the companies themselves.

Median

10.2%

19,089 companies disclose it

Middle half

2.7–27.3

a quarter below 2.7%, a quarter above 27.3%

Highest sector

50.0%

Medical, health care and welfare

Lowest sector

3.3%

Electricity, gas, heat supply and water

Distribution

19,089 companies. The median, not the mean — a few extreme filings would drag the mean around.

By sector

Sector	Companies	Median	25th pct	75th pct
Medical, health care and welfare	2,469	50.0	35.7	62.1
Education, learning support	328	28.6	16.7	45.4
Living-related and personal services and amusement services	252	20.0	8.8	44.1
Finance and insurance	542	16.0	8.9	24.9
Compound services	183	15.7	7.4	23.5
Accommodations, eating and drinking services	491	14.3	6.3	24.7
Scientific research, professional and technical services	647	14.3	4.4	33.3
Services, n.e.c.	2,441	14.3	3.6	31.6
Information and communications	1,600	11.3	5.3	20.0
Industries unable to classify	149	11.0	2.3	27.1
Real estate and goods rental and leasing	360	9.6	3.9	19.2
Wholesale and retail trade	2,656	8.0	2.4	20.0
Transport and postal services	772	4.8	0.0	10.6
Manufacturing	4,446	4.5	0.0	10.0
Construction	1,543	3.9	0.0	13.0
Electricity, gas, heat supply and water	100	3.3	0.0	6.7

Sectors with at least 50 disclosing companies (16 of them). Medical, health care and welfare and Electricity, gas, heat supply and water differ by 46.7%. Sectors are the major divisions of Japan's standard industrial classification; company size is not held constant.

How to read this

"Manager" is defined differently by each company. Some count from section-head level, others include team leads. This is not a number to compare company to company by one point.
Companies disclose these figures themselves, under Japan's Youth Employment Promotion Act, and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare publishes the collected data (Shokuba-Lab). This is not from annual securities reports, so the population differs from the rest of this site — listed and unlisted alike, but only those that disclose.
Companies that disclose nothing are absent. Firms with worse numbers have more reason to stay quiet, so read these figures as the optimistic end of reality.
These are company-level averages. One department can be far worse than the company figure and never show up.
Per-company figures for listed companies are on each company page (company index).

Not sure how this works in Japan? Women in management: how the system works.

Other benchmarks

Retirement payouts ・ Bonuses ・ Starting salaries ・ Overtime hours ・ Paid leave uptake ・ Men's parental leave ・ Women in management ・ all benchmarks.

Source: Shokuba-Lab (職場情報総合サイト) and the Database of Companies Promoting Women's Participation, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare — open data, compiled by Corpus. 19,089 companies. Not provided or endorsed by any government agency. Japanese edition: 女性管理職比率の相場.