REPORT OF THE

2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

MOVING THE NEEDLE ON
GENDER EQUITY THROUGH
US-JAPAN COLLABORATIONJAPAN CENTER FOR
INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE(JCIE/JAPAN)

JAPAN CENTER FOR
INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE(JCIE/USA)REPORT OF THE

2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

MOVING THE NEEDLE ON
GENDER EQUITY THROUGH
US-JAPAN COLLABORATION

Prepared by

Kim Gould Ashizawa(JCIE/USA)Copyright © 2022 Japan Center for International Exchange All rights reserved.
Written by Kimberly Gould Ashizawa.
Design and typesetting by Patrick Ishiyama.
Japan Center for International Exchange
Meisan Tameike Bldg. 7F, 1-1-12 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0052, Japan
www.jcie.or.jp/japan
Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE/USA)
475 Riverside Drive, Suite 731, New York, New York 10115, USA
www.jcie.org

C O NTE NTS

Acknowledgments

1

Overview

3

Summary of Findings

5

Recommendations

8

Dialogue Report

10

Survey Reports

26

United States

27

Japan

41

Participants

53

1

Acknowledgments

More than 40 women from the United States and Japan, including politicians and government officials, business leaders, journalists, policy experts,
academics, and nonprofit leaders, participated in the 3rd US-Japan Women
Leaders Dialogue. The discussions were held virtually over the course of three
sessions in the early months of 2022. These meetings built on two previous
dialogues and allowed participants to dive deeper into some of the key policy
issues affecting women in our countries and explore real-world solutions. They
also gave us the opportunity to continue expanding our network of fascinating
and inspiring women leaders. Moreover, the dialogue prompted our efforts toadvocate for the inclusion of gender issues on the US-Japan summit agenda,
which was achieved during the May 2021 summit between President Bidenand Prime Minister Kishida.
The dialogue was first launched by the Japan Center for International
Exchange (JCIE) in 2017, when a delegation of female Diet members traveled to the United States for talks with a wide range of policymakers, policy
specialists, and business leaders in Washington DC and New York. That trip
culminated in a weekend retreat at Pocantico with American women leadersfrom various sectors to explore the challenges facing US-Japan relations andthe shared obstacles women have overcome to achieve success.
In 2021, in light of the pandemic, we launched a virtual version of the dialogue with the enthusiastic support of two legislators who are leaders on gender equality issues in their respective governments and who agreed to serveas co-chairs of the dialogue, Hon. Seiko Noda (Liberal Democratic Party) andHon. Diana DeGette (D-Colorado). Those sessions focused on the impact ofthe pandemic on women, ways to address the societal inequities that the pandemic had revealed, and the need to amplify the voices of women in policymaking. A report of the 2021 dialogue is available on our website at https://bit.
ly/seekingthenextnormal.
Our 2022 virtual meetings delved into greater detail on these issues, examining the state of gender policy in each country, initiatives to encourage greater
engagement by women in policymaking, and efforts to promote women in
STEM fields. We were once again fortunate to have the leadership of ouresteemed co-chairs, Representative DeGette and then Minister Noda (the latter
served from October 2021 to August 2022 in the Kishida cabinet with a portfolio that included the posts of Minister in Charge of Women’s Empowerment
and Minister of State for Gender Equality). We held three online meetings
in January, February, and March 2022, and were able to hold one smaller inperson meeting in May, when Representative DeGette visited Japan. We would
like to express our sincere gratitude to our chairs for their time and efforts to2 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

ensure that the sessions were a great success. They brought to the table not only
their extensive experience and insight, but also their strong commitment to
US-Japan relations and to empowering other women leaders.
We would also like to thank all of the women leaders from the United States
and Japan who took part. Their willingness to share their unique experiences
and rich insights led to incredibly frank and illuminating discussions. We areparticularly indebted to our resource speakers who kicked off our sessions withthought-provoking presentations: Jennifer Klein (White House Gender Policy
Council), Jean Sinzdak (Center for American Women and Politics, RutgersNew Brunswick), Mari Miura (Sophia University), Takako Hashimoto (Chiba
University of Commerce), and Rita Colwell (former Director, US National
Science Foundation). Ms. Sinzdak also provided us with a thoughtful andcomprehensive survey of US initiatives to promote women’s engagement inpolitics, which is included in this report.
In addition, we must thank Hannah Katz and Kazuko Shoji in our
co-chairs’ offices for their assistance and patience as we organized the sessions
and recruited participants, and our talented simultaneous interpreters, Shiori
Okazaki, Sanae Sasajima, and Doreen Jackson, whose skillful translations
made these conversations possible. We are also grateful to Kazuyo Kato, executive director of JCIE/USA for her leadership, and our JCIE colleagues, Hifumi
Tajima, Kim Gould Ashizawa, and Hayley Hutchison, for their tireless work toensure the success of the meetings.
Our sincere thanks go to the MRA Foundation, whose continued support has made this dialogue possible, the Toshiba International Foundation
for their generous funding for the preparation of this report, and ITOCHUInternational for their additional support of the dialogue. The views expressedin this report are solely the responsibility of JCIE and are not intended toreflect the stances of our funders.
We hope that the recommendations that emerged from this year’s dialogue
inform the next phase of efforts to promote gender equity and equality in ourcountries and will further strengthen US-Japan partnership and bilateral relations moving forward.

Peggy Blumenthal
Board Chair, JCIE/USA

Hideko Katsumata
Executive Director
and COO,
JCIE/JapanREPORT OF THE

2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

Overview

The 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue was held virtually in January–March
2022, bringing together leaders from both countries for meetings to share insights
into the challenges and opportunities for women’s leadership in various fields. This
program built on two previous US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogues—an in-person
meeting in 2017 and an online version in 2021. This year’s series of three sessions wasco-chaired once again by Rep. Diana DeGette and Rep. Seiko Noda, and it featured
lively discussions on key issues of social and economic equity, how politics impacts
women’s lives and careers, existing and needed frameworks to promote women inpolitics, and ways to encourage gender equity and inclusion in a digital era.
Since the previous dialogue was held in thespring of 2021, the issues covered in our discussions have been front and center in both countries.
In late 2021, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP) held leadership elections, which also
determined the prime minister of Japan. Our
co-chair, Rep. Noda, was one of two women who
ran for the post, and her platform drew a striking
degree of attention to the issues facing working
women, families, and women in politics in Japan.
Following the election of Prime Minister Fumio
Kishida, Rep. Noda was subsequently named
Minister of State for Gender Equality, Minister ofState for Measures for Declining Birthrate, as wellas Minister in Charge of Women’s Empowerment,
among other responsibilities in the Kishida Cabinet. However, despite that step forward, Japan also took one step backward as the Lower House election held shortly
thereafter saw the number of women elected to that body drop from 10.1 to just 9.7
percent. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Democratic Party has been debating
how best to invest in the workforce, with a strong emphasis on the need for greater
support for childcare and eldercare as a way to get women back into the workforce
in the post-pandemic era. While President Biden was able to include $39 billion in
the American Rescue Plan to support access to childcare for essential workers andto help maintain the struggling industry during the pandemic, his subsequent Build
Back Better legislation, which included a proposal to make a strong investment in

4 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

the care infrastructure, met with resistance even from some within his own party.
These trends show that the issues discussed last year are now part of the mainstream
discourse, but that there is still much work to be done.
Following up on these developments, the 2022 dialogue focused first on some of
the key areas where policymakers and other leaders are working to promote greater
gender equity. We then examined best practices in promoting women in politics inboth countries, comparing the processes and support systems that currently exist
and how they can be strengthened. To inform that discussion, JCIE also preparedsurveys on the existing support systems in the US and Japan that are designed tofoster women’s political participation. And finally, we took a deeper look at the stateof women in the STEM fields, which are so critical to the future economic growth of
our countries.
Led by our co-chairs, the discussions engaged more than 40 women, including
national legislators and leaders from government, business, media, philanthropy,
academia, and think tanks. JCIE invited leading experts to kick off each session withpresentations designed to offer background information and spark conversation.
This was followed by a lively roundtable-style discussion, co-moderated by Hideko
Katsumata, executive director and COO of JCIE/Japan, and Peggy Blumenthal,board chair of JCIE/USA. Based on Chatham House rules, the comments made were
not for attribution, and thus while the conclusions drawn in this report reflect manyof the ideas, themes, and tenor of the discussions, they are solely the responsibilityof the author.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

5

Summary of Findings

1. Improve Economic Equity and Security for All Women
Treat women’s economic security as a critical component of thedomestic and global economic recovery
As our economies build back from the pandemic, we must take the opportunity
to rethink fundamental structural inequities that disproportionately impacted
women’s economic security during this crisis. The overrepresentation of womenin non-regular and informal employment is a serious concern that pushes women
into vulnerable positions and lessens their lifetime earning potential. Workforce
development, training, and reevaluations of supply chains are important tools to
address this issue and to provide more equitable access to good-paying, full-timejobs in growth sectors.
Maintain and expand access to workstyles that promote flexibility
and work-life balance
Government and corporate leaders should encourage the continued adoption of
telework and telehealth, which offer parents more freedom over their schedules andminimizes commuting. This creates a new opportunity for both men and women torethink their work-life balance and the balance of their contributions to houseworkand childcare.
Provide equitable access to and encourage the use of paid family
and medical leave for all workers
Ensure that workers—both men and women—across all sectors of the economy andin all types of businesses have equitable access to paid family and medical leave, andthat they are able to utilize that leave without fear of reprisal or negative impact on
their careers.
Address the caregiving crises in each country to improve access andaffordability
The caregiving sector is a critical element in closing gender gaps, but it poses adifficult conundrum: users of care services require affordability, but providers ofcare—who are predominantly women—must be adequately compensated. The
United States can learn from the Japanese government’s experience in offering freepreschool and its success in improving the access to such services in recent years.
Both countries must examine how to ensure that caregivers are adequately compensated for their crucial work of caring for those most vulnerable in our society, ourchildren and elders.

6 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

Quantify the unpaid contributions of women to the economy
Around the world, women spend substantially more time than men on unpaid
household chores and care work—cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, and providing child or elder care. New approaches are needed to recognize, reduce, andredistribute unpaid work. There have been initiatives such as the recent introduction of Medicaid programs in the United States that reimburse a designated family
member or friend who serves as a caregiver, and their effectiveness as an example ofquantifying and compensating work should be examined.

2. Create and Strengthen Empowering Frameworks for Women in
Politics and Business
Engage greater numbers and diversity of women in politics andcorporate leadership
Ensuring the inclusion of a wider range of female voices in terms of age, marital
status, parental status, socioeconomic background, ethnicity, geographic base, etc., is
crucial for more informed decision making, whether that entails understanding thereal-life impact of policies or identifying new or overlooked business opportunities.
Start early to change perceptions
More interventions are needed at younger ages to inform girls and young women,
as well as their male counterparts, that politics and business are not just a “man’sworld,” but places where all people can and should participate and make their voices
heard. This change in perceptions requires that parents send the right messages toboth daughters and sons. It also requires efforts by schools, media, and others toensure that young people see positive representations of women in leadership roles.
Increase access to political leadership training programs
There are a wide range of organizations in the United States that promote women’s
political participation and train and support potential candidates, but access is still
uneven across the country and should be improved. In Japan, however, more organizations and initiatives are still needed. Greater engagement of the academic sector
in the development of new and existing political training programs in Japan would
be beneficial. Another important means of promoting political participation is civic
leadership education, particularly for girls and young women. Civic engagement
at the local level also provides important training and pathways to future politicalcareers.
Don’t assume laws are enough—take concrete actions to promote
political engagement
Simply passing laws or “allowing” women to run is not enough. Active interventions are needed to successfully recruit, train, and fund women candidates, create
caucuses, and establish other mechanisms to help one another. This is particularly
true given that politicians require what have been called the three “Cs”—confidence,
capacity, and connections.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

7

Create a “reserve army” of women with leadership skills
Efforts in the private sector to ensure that women can rise to executive positions will
also help create a pool of women with the necessary decision-making experience,
confidence, and financial resources who can be encouraged to step up and run for
office. Similarly, it is important to promote job mobility between politics and othersectors in Japan, and to select women with relevant experience for cabinet positions.

3. Promote Women in STEM
Improve diversity and inclusion in STEM at the K-12 level
Both governments should continue and expand their initiatives to encourage girls’
participation in STEM at the K-12 level should be continued and expanded. At thesame time, it is important to ensure that teachers’ and parents’ unconscious (or conscious) biases do not get handed down to young children. In addition, girls (andboys) need to see more female role models in STEM and be exposed to more information about the reality and variety of work in STEM fields.
Improve diversity and inclusion in STEM in universities
The presence of and mentoring by female professors can play a decisive role inencouraging young women to pursue a career in STEM. Universities need to havea full-scale, data-based articulation of their institutions’ vision for recruitment,
retention, and advancement of women in STEM. At the classroom level, reframingscience and technology as a means to solve problems that young women care about
can provide greater motivation for them to enter and continue in STEM fields.
Promote continuing education and reskilling for women
To help advance women in STEM, ongoing education and reskilling programs canprovide valuable assistance to women who want to reenter the field after pausing
their careers to care for children or other family members, as well as to women who
may not have started in technology-related areas when they were first recruited but
see that as a potential path moving forward.
Invest in women-led businesses in the tech sector
Venture capital (VC) is essential for entrepreneurship in STEM-related business, yet
the field in both the United States and Japan is dominated by men. A number ofpublic and private initiatives have been launched to assist businesswomen—e.g., theTokyo municipal government’s Acceleration Program in Tokyo (APT) to help women
entrepreneurs expand globally, or Women Who Tech’s various grant programs for
women-led tech startups—and it would be helpful for Japan and the United States tocompare notes in greater detail on what has and has not been effective to date in thetwo countries and consider ways to ensure that more women’s voices are represented
in the VC sector.

Recommendations:
An Agenda for US-Japan
Collaboration on Gender
EquityIn their May 2022 Joint Statement, President Biden and Prime Minister Kishida“concurred that ensuring that all people, regardless of gender identity, can achieve
their full potential is both a moral and strategic imperative, critical to every aspectof society and the economy.” While the two countries have at times cooperated onefforts to address such topics as education for girls or economic advancement for
women in developing nations, which are certainly commendable initiatives thatshould be continued and expanded, they have yet to propose any partnership toimprove the less-than-exemplary status of women in their own countries. If we hopeto lead by example, then the next step must be to clearly elucidate and integrate
gender equity in the bilateral US-Japan collaborative agenda, not only in our development assistance agenda but also in the context of an agenda to empower women in
our own countries as well. The following are potential action items for that agenda.

Explicitly incorporate gender in existing agreements
A Fact Sheet on the US-Japan Competitiveness and Resilience (CoRe) Partnershipissued during the May 2022 Kishida-Biden Summit stressed, “Our exchange programs will continue to distribute the benefits of the CoRe Partnership inclusively
and equitably, to empower women in our societies.” Steps should be taken to clarify
and monitor how existing initiatives under the rubric of the CoRe Partnership, as
well as the US-Japan Climate Partnership and other bilateral agreements, will work
to ensure equity and inclusion.

Promote comparative research and dialogues on governmentand corporate policies to improve the wellbeing of women
The United States and Japan should provide funding for joint analyses and dialogues
that examine policies and practices both in the public and private sector that can
improve the status of women. Examples of topics that could be covered by suchfunding include the following:• how to reduce the ratio of non-regular employees in the female labor force• best practices for maintaining and integrating telework and telemedicine in postpandemic life
• how to ensure equitable access to benefits such as paid family and medical leave• best practices for training and reskilling women to enhance their careers or reenter thelabor market post-childbirthReport of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

9• the effectiveness of quotas and targets for the promotion of gender equity in boardrooms, management, and politics• lessons to be learned from America’s Title IX policy for improving gender equity• best practices in the two countries on the recruitment, retention, and promotion oftalented women in academia

Expand bilateral efforts to promote women in STEMThe United States and Japan should create a bilateral program that focuses on womenin STEM in both the education and business sectors.
• On the educational front, provide support for joint analyses on how best to encourage
girls to study STEM, how to effectively retain and promote women researchers, and how
to provide recurrent and reskilling educational opportunities that contribute to a more
viable career path for these women in science, technology, and engineering. Bilateral
academic exchanges and fellowship opportunities should be offered that target womenin STEM.
• On the business front, promote programs that build networks among women leadersin STEM and encourage interaction with younger generations of women to show them
what a potential career path in STEM might look like. For example, the US government has been convening a TechWomen program that offers mentoring and exchange
to women in developing countries, pairing them with women at science and technology
companies in Silicon Valley, but women in the United States and Japan could also benefit from such support and networking opportunities.

Encourage investment in Japanese and American women
entrepreneurs, particularly in future-oriented fields
Women entrepreneurs in both countries struggle when raising capital, in no smallpart due to the fact that VC remains a male-dominated field. Opportunities shouldbe created to increase US-Japan networks of entrepreneurs and of venture capitalists who are interested in supporting women-led companies. The two governments
should consider incorporating grants to women-led businesses in critical fields
related to shared objectives of the bilateral partnership such as green energy, cybersecurity, supply chain resilience, and femtech.

Increase the availability of funding to civil society organizations
for people-to-people exchanges
The sharing of lessons learned, the creation of empowering frameworks and networks, and the simple words of mutual encouragement that are achieved throughbilateral exchanges can have a profound impact on participants. In particular,cross-sectoral US-Japan dialogues that draw on the experiences of women in politics, business, academia, policy research, and media have proven to provide uniqueperspectives and insights. But the availability of funding for such exchanges has been
shrinking over the past decade. Both governments should consider ways to expand
their support of such programs.

10 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

Dialogue Report
Session Topics and Speakers
Session 1: Gender and the Role of Politics (January 12, 2022)
Hon. Seiko Noda, Minister in Charge of Women’s Empowerment, Minister of State for Gender
Equality, Minister of State for Measures for Declining Birthrate, LDP (Japan Co-chair)
Ms. Jennifer Klein, Co-chair, White House Gender Policy Council

Session 2: Frameworks for Success—Systems to Empower Women in Politics
and Beyond (February 15, 2022)
Ms. Jean Sinzdak, Associate Director, Center for American Women and Politics, Eagleton
Institute of Politics, Rutgers-New Brunswick
Prof. Mari Miura, Professor of Political Science, Faculty of Law, and Deputy Director,
Promotion of Gender Equality Office, Sophia University

Session 3: Promoting Women in the Digital Society (March 22, 2021)
Dr. Takako Hashimoto, Vice President, Chiba University of Commerce
Dr. Rita Colwell, Distinguished University Professor, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg
School of Public Health; Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland,College Park; former Director, US National Science Foundation; Member, Board ofGovernors, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

Gender and Politics: Improving Equity
and Economic Security for Women
Alleviating the Impact of thePandemic on Women
In January 2022, around 40 women sat downin front of their Zoom cameras for the opening
session of the 3rd US-Japan Women Leaders
Dialogue. It was evening in the United Statesand morning in Japan. Many of the participants
had joined in the 2021 sessions, and all had
hoped that the pandemic would be behind us
by the time we met again, but unfortunately, theUnited States was reaching the peak of a major
spike in COVID-19 cases caused by the Omicron

variant while Japan was just entering what would
become its worst phase of the pandemic to date.
Parents in the two countries were grappling once
again with the looming possibility of school closures and the need to take time off from work totend to sick family members, industries such as
tourism and leisure continued to take a hit, andoffices pushed back their timelines yet again fora full return to in-person work. In short, the discussions were held against a backdrop of ongoing uncertainty and disruption that continued totake a tremendous toll on women as they carriedout their roles in the economy, their communities, and their families.
Both governments have responded to the pandemic by implementing a range of policies intendedReport of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

Systemic Barriers Facing Women in
the Economy
Regular vs. Non-regular Employment
The discussions focused on a number of systemic
issues that need to be addressed. First and foremost, as noted above, the pre-pandemic model, in
which a high proportion of women are employed
as informal or “non-regular” workers (parttime employees, freelancers, and contract-based
employees), is clearly no longer tenable. Thisissue is particularly pronounced in Japan, which
has a surprisingly high level of labor force participation among women. In fact, 76.3 percent of
women in Japan were working in 2016—which
was higher than in the United States (see fig. 1).2
But this achievement is undermined by the factthat a large portion of those workers are engagedin part-time work—a trend that becomes moreprevalent once women are about a decade outof college. Indeed, pre-pandemic statistics showthat while 61 percent of women aged 25–34 werefull-time regular employees, the numbers flippedfor older age groups so that 61 percent of women
35–64 were non-regular employees or selfemployed.3 Workforce development, training,

Figure 1. Labor force participation of women ages 15–64,
1970–2021
80

JAPAN
UNITED STATES
70

Percentage

to alleviate its impact and support women andfamilies. In the United States, the 2020 Families
First Coronavirus Response Act and the CARESAct under President Trump, and the subsequentAmerican Rescue Plan Act of 2021 under President
Biden introduced a number of measures. These
included providing emergency paid sick leave andfamily medical leave, extending unemployment
benefits, offering direct payments to individuals
and payments to employers who retained theirworkers, expanding the child tax credit and thechild and dependent care credit, and funding
schools to help make classrooms safe to reopen andto deal with “learning loss” during the pandemic,
among many others. Similarly, Japan offered an
employment adjustment subsidy to help employers
retain employees during the downturn, extended
unemployment benefits, and sought ways to reinforce the safety net for non-regular workers.
While these efforts helped, women were still
hard hit during the pandemic, and as our dialogue
convened, workforce participation and income
levels were still well below their pre-pandemic
levels. As an International Monetary Fund (IMF)
working paper described with regard to the situation in Japan, women are “overrepresented
in vulnerable industries and occupations thattypically offer less stable working conditions andfewer training and growth opportunities. This
points to structural inequities and impediments
for female, young, and non-regular workers thatshould be addressed irrespective of the pandemic.”1 Recognizing that women are facing thesesame disadvantages in both countries, the womenleaders who gathered for our dialogue stressed
the importance of advancing women’s economic
security as a critical component of the domestic
and global economic recovery.

11

60

OECD

50

40
1970

1975

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

Year

Source: OECD

1. Shinya Kotera and Jochen M. Schmittmann, “The Japanese Labor Market During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” IMF Working
Papers WP/22/89 (May 2022).
2. Jay Shambaugh, Ryan Nunn, and Becca Portman, “Lessons from the Rise of Women’s Labor Force Participation in
Japan,” The Hamilton Project (November 2017), https://www.brookings.edu/research/lessons-from-the-rise-of-womenslabor-force-participation-in-japan/.
3. Statistics Bureau, Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 2019 Labour Force Survey, https://www.estat.go.jp/en.

2015

2020

12 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

and supply chain diversification are important
tools to reduce the overrepresentation of womenin vulnerable sectors of the economy and in jobs
with no prospects for career development while
promoting equitable access to well-paying, fulltime jobs in the growth sectors of the future.
This issue is directly tied to concerns about women’s lifetime earning capacity and economic security. As life expectancy for women in both countries is longer than that of men by five to six years,4
it is important that women have lifetime earnings
that can sustain them into their old age. As of 2021,
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment (OECD) found that nearly 23 percent of women aged 65 or older are living in poverty in Japan, and nearly 26 percent in the UnitedStates—significantly higher than the percentagesof their male counterparts.5 As our populations are
greying and the burdens on our social safety nets
are growing increasingly heavy, the implications of
the old model of women’s employment clearly havean impact on everyone.

Percent

Why Not Full-Time?
There are various reasons why women are notregular employees, including sociocultural forces,
economic factors, and structural barriers, as wellas personal choice. In the case of Japan, one reason
women opt for part-time work is that there is a tax
disincentive to full-time employment. If a spouseearns less than ¥1.5 million (roughly US$11,000)
annually, they receive a tax deduction of ¥380,000(currently around US$2,800). There have beencalls to address this issue (and the amount was
raised slightly in 2018), but as is true in any country, there is often a steep political price to pay
when governments take away a tax break.
Flexibility is another reason that women, particularly mothers, have chosen the non-regular
employment route. The sudden diffusion of telework as a result of the pandemic has changed
that calculus as it offers many parents more
freedom over their schedules and eliminates thetime and cost of commuting. It has provided a
new opportunity for both women and men torethink the work-life balance, and—at least intheory—allows men more time to contribute tohousework and childcare. Indeed,in the United States, many compaFigure 2. Income poverty rates among people aged 65+
nies have encountered reluctance
Percentage of those with income lower than 50 percent ofmedian equivalized household disposable income
among employees to a full return tothe office. A Pew survey in January30
2022 found that among employed
25.9
adults whose workplaces were open,
22.8
76 percent were still choosing to
19.6
20
16.4
work from home all or most of the
15.1
time simply because they preferred it
10.1
10
rather than because of concerns overthe pandemic. And 17 percent indiMen
Women
Men
Women
Men Womencated that they were telecommuting
0
because they had moved (either
UNITED STATES
JAPAN
OECD
temporarily or permanently) away
Source: OECD, “Pensions at a Glance 2021”
from their workplace, indicating thatthey were unlikely to be returning

4. According to the World Bank, women in Japan have a life expectancy at birth that is six years longer than their malecounterparts, while American women have a roughly five-year advantage. In 2020, Japanese men’s life expectancy at birth was
82, compared to their female counterparts who had a life expectancy of 88 years; in the United States, those numbers were
75 and 80 (reflecting a sharp pandemic-related drop). World Bank, “Life Expectancy at Birth,” https://data.worldbank.org/
indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.FE.IN.
5. OECD, “Pensions at a Glance 2021: OECD and G20 Indicators—Old-age income poverty,” https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/
finance-and-investment/pensions-at-a-glance-2021_d76e4fad-en.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

to their pre-pandemic style of work.6 In Japan,
a survey by Persol Research and Consulting
Co. found that about 28.5 percent of the 20,000
employees it interviewed were working fromhome in February 2022, and 80 percent wanted
to continue to have that option.7 Participants inour dialogue lauded the adoption of teleworkand telemedicine during the pandemic, bothof which provide critical flexibility for womenand vulnerable populations, and they expressed
the hope that ongoing access to these options
can be integrated into the post-pandemic economy as well. Leadership and support from thegovernments of the United States and Japan areneeded to ensure the promotion of technologies
that allow for flexibility in the workplace and forthese options to be maintained moving forward.
Where You Work Matters
Of course, not all jobs lend themselves to telework.
Women in the healthcare, retail, and hospitality
sectors are less likely to be able to take advantageof that option, and part-time workers are lesslikely than full-time workers. The fact that womenare disproportionately engaged in precisely thosefront-line, in-person sectors is another structuralissue that places women at a disadvantage.
The type of company that a woman works foralso impacts her access to flexibility, benefits, andadvancement opportunities. Participants notedthat in Japan in particular, but in the United States
as well, there tends to be a different corporate
culture between large companies and small andmedium-sized enterprises (SMEs). While large
companies offer greater stability and benefits,
their more rigid tenure-based promotion systems
can put women at a disadvantage. Conversely,
SMEs may offer greater flexibility in terms ofcareer trajectories for women, but they are less13

likely to offer the same types of job benefits.
This led to more women at SMEs having to quit
their jobs during the pandemic. Policy measures
are needed to encourage greater flexibility andopportunities for women at large corporations
and greater access to safety net such as paid family
and medical leave for those at smaller businesses.
Benefits and earning potential are an issue not
only in the business sector but also in the nonprofit world—a sector where women represent
the majority of the workforce in both countries.8
This sector plays a critical role in addressing key
social issues—supporting the health and welfareof children, the elderly, single mothers, or people
with disabilities; providing international humanitarian relief efforts; fighting for the environment;
and supporting women’s empowerment; to namea few—and its contribution to GDP in both of our
two countries is said to be between 4 and 6 percent.9 To put that in context, in both Japan and theUnited States, that is substantially more than the
agricultural sector’s contribution to GDP, which
is just over 1 percent. But in Japan in particular,
many still confuse nonprofit work with volunteer
work, meaning that employees are grossly undercompensated for their contributions to society.
More robust partnership with and support fromgovernment and business is needed to ensure theeconomic stability of this crucial sector.
Unpaid, Underpaid, and Unaffordable
Caregiving
Access to and affordability of caregiving for children and aging parents is another common challenge facing women in both countries. Caregiving
as an occupation tends to be a low-paying job,leading to staff turnover and shortages. The pandemic exacerbated that problem in the UnitedStates, where childcare centers have had to raise

6. Kim Parker, Juliana Horowitz, and Rachel Minkin, “COVID-19 Pandemic Continues to Reshape Work in America,” Pew ResearchCenter, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/02/16/covid-19-pandemic-continues-to-reshape-work-in-america/.
7. Takashi Endo, “Companies and Employees Wide Apart on Views on Teleworking,” Asahi Shimbun, April 20, 2022, https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14602888.
8. An estimated 73 percent of the US nonprofit workforce is female according to Network for Good (https://www.networkforgood.
com/resource/celebrate-women-in-nonprofit/).
9. For information on the Japanese nonprofit sector, see Aya Okada, et al., “The State of Nonprofit Sector Research in Japan,”
Voluntaristics 2.3 (2017): 12, https://set-hirota.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/32983521ad6634b8d4e0b8bb8e61b2e1.pdf; for
information on the US nonprofit sector, see Independent Sector, “Health of the U.S. Nonprofit Sector Quarterly Review,”
September 30, 2022, https://independentsector.org/resource/health-of-the-u-s-nonprofit-sector/.

14 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

pay in order to attract and retain employees, andthey have simultaneously incurred costs related
to health safety. These increased expenses have
led the price of childcare to rise to more than
$10,000 per child, which is more than 10 percentof the median income for married couples withchildren and more than 35 percent of the medianincome for single parents.10 This cost factors intoa woman’s decision whether or not to return tofull-time employment. The cost of childcare in
Japan is much lower, and the government provides free preschool for children aged three andolder. In the past, access has been a serious issue,
with more than 25,000 children on waiting lists
for nursery care in 2017, but a combination offactors—including efforts to increase the number of daycare centers, a rise in employer-createdchildcare centers, the declining number of births
in Japan, and the impact of the pandemic—ledthat number to drop below 3,000 in 2022.11 The
dialogue participants noted that the caregiving
sector is a critical factor in closing gender gaps
in the domestic and global economy, but it posesa difficult conundrum: users of care services
require affordability, but providers of care must
be adequately compensated, which they generally
are not.
Compounding this issue is the fact that muchof the caregiving in both countries is unpaid workthat falls to women. For example, when a child issick, it is usually the mother that leaves work andpicks them up from school. Moreover, the pay gap
between men and women means that during the
pandemic, when schools shut down, it often mademore financial sense for mothers to leave theirjobs to stay at home with their children than it didfor fathers. Eldercare too falls predominantly towomen, and unlike past generations, today’s family caregivers are likely to be employed outside thehome as well, therefore requiring them to juggle
their many responsibilities.

There is a need to recognize, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work and to invest in the care
workforce, including home health workers, childcare providers, and domestic workers. Indeed,this need is spelled out clearly in Sustainable
Development Goal (SDG) 5 on achieving genderequality and empowerment. Target 5.4 states,“Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic
work through the provision of public services,
infrastructure and social protection policies andthe promotion of shared responsibility within thehousehold and the family as nationally appropriate.” It was noted that one practice in the UnitedStates that may be instructional for Japan is a relatively new policy within the Medicaid insurance
program that allows family members to be paid
to serve as caregivers for their loved ones.12 Thisis one example of quantifying the contributions of
women to the economy.

Creating and Strengthening
Empowering Frameworks
The Latest Developments
In the year that passed between our 2021 dialogue and the 2022 dialogue, the Japanese and
US administrations have been working to bolster
the institutional frameworks supporting women.
In February 2022, spearheaded by Minister Seiko
Noda, the Japanese government introduced a billto create a new agency for children and families,
which subsequently passed in June and is scheduled to launch in the spring of 2023. The newagency is intended to integrate policies acrossmultiple government ministries and agencies
to improve the handling of issues concerning
children, such as declining birth rates, childpoverty, and sex crimes. Japan also began providing health insurance coverage in April 2022

10. Economic Policy Institute, “Child Care Costs in the United States,” https://www.epi.org/child-care-costs-in-the-united-states/.
11. Nippon.com, “Japan Sees 90% Drop in Daycare Waiting Lists Over the Last Five Years,” September 14, 2022, https://www.
nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01428/.
12. See, for example, Salom Teshale, Wendy Fox-Grage, and Kitty Purington, “Paying Family Caregivers through Medicaid
Consumer-Directed Programs: State Opportunities and Innovations,” National Academy for State Health Policy website,
April 2021, https://www.nashp.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/paying-family-caregivers-April2021.pdf.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialoguebase, etc.—is critical for more informed decision
making. For example, American legislators havefound that the inclusion of younger women in
Congress and women from diverse backgrounds
has been important when talking about legislation to address the cost of college, housing costs,
and so on.
Sadly, however, the United States and Japan
hold the bottom two slots in terms of women’s
legislative representation among the G7 nations.
Among the 38 OECD countries as well, the UnitedStates ranked 26th in 2021, while Japan was deadlast at 38th in the number of women parliamentarians at the national level.14
This is not to say that there has not been
progress. In the United States, the 2016 election
jump-started a movement of record numbers of
women running for office at all levels of government, eventually leading to the election in 2020of the first woman (and first woman of color)to the office of vice president. And looking at

Figure 3. Number of elected officials at the state and national
levels (as of August 2022)
Women MenJAPAN

UNITED STATES

419
307

185
123
76
45

46

9

13. White House, National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality (2021), https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/
uploads/2021/10/National-Strategy-on-Gender-Equity-and-Equality.pdf.
14. OECD, Women in Politics (2021), https://data.oecd.org/inequality/women-in-politics.htm. Women in politics is defined here
as “the share of women in the national lower or single houses of parliament. Measured as a percentage of total parliamentarians.”

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for 70 percent of the cost of fertility treatments,
a move that not only addresses the country’s falling birthrate and shrinking labor force, but also
allows women greater control over the timing ofstarting or expanding their family and over theircareer trajectory.
In the United States, the Biden administration
created the White House Gender Policy Council
in 2021 to improve gender equity and equality in
America’s foreign and domestic policy. The council’s membership includes all members of the cabinet and many other key officials, from the director of National Intelligence to the director of the
National Science Foundation. In October 2021,
the council released a national strategy that enumerated strategic priorities including economic
security, gender-based violence, health, climatechange, science and technology, and democratic
participation, among others.13 The structure of
the council helps ensure that a gendered approachis incorporated across the whole of government.
But whether or not the priorities that can makea dent in gender inequality actually get enacted or
funded often depends on whether or not womenare present in the “room where it happens,” theseats of power where those policies are decided. In
the business context, one woman at our dialogue
noted that because 70 percent of her company’sboard was comprised of women, they were able
to quickly adopt pandemic policies in support of
employees with children, for example, or to recognize the need for measures to address mental
health. In the political arena, a legislator pointed
out that conversely, when policies are being discussed in a room full of male politicians (particularly those who are older), gender issues and thepotential implications of a policy on women andchildren are rarely top of mind.
For that reason, our participants stressedthat engaging not only more women, but also
women with diverse backgrounds and experiences—including age, marital status, parental
status, socioeconomic background, geographic

1516 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

cabinet-level officials, roughly half of the Bidencabinet is female as of this writing.
In Japan, the 2018 passage of the Gender
Equality Act did little to move the needle at first,
as the 2021 Lower House election actually saw adrop in seats held by women. But in the summerof 2022 (after the conclusion of our dialogue thisyear), a record number of Japanese women ran
in the Upper House elections—one-third of all
candidates. The result also set a record, as womenclaimed 35 out of the 245 seats that were up for
grabs. But that baby step of progress still leaves
the ratio of women in the Upper House at a woeful
9.9 percent presently, and the number of womenin the Kishida cabinet, which stood at three earlier in the year, was reduced to two in a reshuffle
that took place not long after the election.

Moving the Needle on Representation
What, then, is needed to move the needle and get
women elected? That was the focus of the second
session of our dialogue. The surveys included inthis report were prepared in order to offer somebackground on the frameworks currently in place
to help encourage young women to step into
leadership positions. They also point to gaps andhurdles facing women in each country, and our
discussions built off their findings.
In the US survey report, Jean Sindzak of
the Center for American Women and Politics(CAWP) at Rutgers University, one of the country’s most respected organizations conducting
research and advocacy for women’s political leadership, laid out the myriad organizations—somedating back to the 1800s and others created justin recent decades—that are working to promotewomen’s political participation across the UnitedStates. She described eight areas in which thesegroups are active: campaign trainings for women,
non-gender-specific campaign trainings, organizations for women’s political empowerment,
women’s political action committees (PACs),organizations of women elected officials, political appointment projects, women’s legislative
caucuses, and youth civic leadership programsfor young women and girls. Based on CAWP’s
research and experiences over the years, Sinzdak
stressed, “The solutions to barriers to women’s
political participation as candidates and officeholders are to intervene at younger ages, to routinely and consistently ask more women to run,to train them so they feel qualified to run, and toprovide resources and support at various points
on the political engagement spectrum.”As participants read and discussed the US andJapan surveys, there were two common themesthat stood out in terms of moving that needle. The
first was that we will not make real progress until
we address the deeply rooted socioeconomic andcultural factors that deter young women frompursuing careers in politics. Despite the fact thatwomen generally lead their male counterparts interms of civic engagement in areas such as volunteerism and membership in community organizations, by the time women reach college, theytend to show less interest in politics and have lessconfidence that they have the qualities needed
to lead. Sinzdak noted that young women needaccessible role models in politics and other leadership positions, and she stressed, “Programs that
aim to shift the narrative of politics as exclusively
a male domain and that help girls build their leadership skills while actively participating in political spaces could have a tremendous impact on thediversity of representation in future generations.”
Participants concurred that more interventions are needed at younger ages to ensure girls
and young women that the world of politics is
not just a “man’s world,” but a world where all
people can and should participate and maketheir voices heard. In this sense, representation
matters, and having women in the public spherewhom young women can look up to is crucial toinspire future generations. It is equally important that young women see current womenleaders on the front lines of business, academia,
think tanks, and the nonprofit world who are
advocating on their behalf.
There was also agreement that women often do
not have a clear picture of what it requires or what
it is like to be a politician—both the good andReport of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

the bad aspects—and there were calls for greater
efforts to share information, including throughacademic research and networking among
women studying politics, more opportunities foryoung people to meet women politicians, andmore media coverage of women in politics. For
example, one legislator shares her personal stories
about her experience via YouTube.
Participants noted that civic leadership education for girls and young women is another criticalarea, and it is particularly lacking in the UnitedStates at the K-12 level. There are, however, awide range of national, state, and local organizations that provide programs for young womento generate interest in politics and leadershipmore broadly. By contrast, in Japan, there are still
too few programs providing training for young
women.
Japanese participants expressed interest in better understanding the impact that Title IX has
had in the US context and how it has been implemented. Title IX, legislation that was spearheaded
by a Japanese-American Congresswoman, thelate Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii, celebrated its 50th
anniversary in 2022, and is considered a landmark in the movement for gender equity. The law
prohibits discrimination based on sex in educational programs or activities that receive federal
financial assistance, and it has had a tremendous
impact on the US educational opportunities for
women as well as on girls’ sports, which promote
confidence and leadership among women. This
was noted as an area where further discussions
would be worthwhile, as efforts to change mindsets among Japan’s youth are sorely needed.
And educational efforts must be directed toward
men as well. It was pointed out that in Japan, thedeeply embedded idea that “politics is a man’sjob” is still accepted by many male legislators andvoters. The result is that women candidates andpoliticians face sexual harassment from their colleagues and their constituents, have a harder timeraising funds (although thanks to Japanese regulations on campaign spending, the sums required17

are much lower than what American candidates
must raise), and often are shut out of the “old boys
network” through which information is sharedand policy decisions are often made. One example of an educational initiative was the release ofa video from Japan’s Cabinet Office in May 2022
that shared examples of the types of sexual harassment that are being faced by female candidates.15
The second theme that was evident from thesurveys and the discussions was that simply
passing laws or “allowing” women to run is notenough. Active interventions are needed to makeprogress, whether that means actively recruiting,training, and funding women or creating caucuses and other mechanisms to let women provide mutual support for one another.
The Japan survey authors, Hideko Katsumata
and Hifumi Tajima note that in addition to theneed for hard skills (practical knowledge andskills for campaigning and fundraising) andsoft skills (leadership preparedness), politiciansrequire what have been called the three “Cs”:
confidence, capacity, and connections. The typesof training and support that women candidates
receive in the United States are sorely lacking stillin Japan. While the regional chapters of many
political parties in Japan are conducting training
programs for potential women candidates, and a
few local nonprofit organizations offer programs
as well, the activities remain limited in scope andcontent. US leadership training programs havealso had the advantage of drawing on close ties
between academia and the political sphere. Japan
has begun to develop programs but making stronger connections with the academic sector would
likely benefit new and existing political training
programs in Japan for an increasing number ofinterested young socially minded individuals
who may one day run for office.
According to the two surveys, women in bothcountries are less likely than men to be asked to
run for office. As one participant noted, sometimes just being asked, “Have you ever thought
about running for public office?” can provide the15. Masatoshi Toda, “Video Shows Harassment Local Politicians Face in Real Life,” Asahi Shimbun, May 1, 2022, https://www.
asahi.com/ajw/articles/14601390.

18 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

needed encouragement for women to consider
politics as a career. The types of organizations
discussed in the surveys that work to identify
and recruit women are thus particularly important and should be expanded. Connected to this,however, is the lack of a “revolving door” in Japanbetween jobs in government and the private sector. For more women to take the leap and enter
politics mid-career, greater job mobility is critical.
Moreover, the Japan survey noted that anotherobstacle to women’s political participation is thatthey also lack the opportunity to hone their leadership skills in other sectors, including businessand civil society. The various impediments towomen rising to executive positions in both countries, although in Japan even more so than in the
United States, limits the “reserve army” of womenwith the necessary decision-making experience,
confidence, and financial resources who can be
encouraged to step up and run for office.
Turning to the business sector, there are examples of quotas being introduced in the UnitedStates as a way to promote more women in
leadership positions in the sector, such as recent
efforts by NASDAQ and the state of California.
To date, Japan has taken a different tack. As of
April 2022, Japan’s Financial Services Agency has
begun requiring firms listed on the Tokyo Stock
Exchange to disclose their “policy and voluntarymeasurable targets” to ensure board diversity(including gender and nationality), and they must
publish the ratio of women in senior positionsin their organizations in their annual securities
report. They must also disclose the average pay bygender and the percentage of male employees whotake childcare leave. These measures do not specify what the ideal targets should be, however, andrely largely on peer pressure rather than penalties.
As a result, while there has been a rise already incompanies with at least one female board member, the number of companies with 2 or more is
still low, and it remains to be seen whether thosenumbers will expand without further pressure. As

of July 2022, the average number of women directors on the boards of Nikkei 225 companies wasjust 1.5 out of an average board size of 10.5 people(14.4 percent).16 It would therefore be useful tohave a US-Japan discussion on best practices inbusiness to consider how to effectively implement
such measures and also to ensure that they extend
beyond the boardroom to management positions
as well.
Quotas are also a potential tool for increasing equity in the political sphere. Various quota
systems have been introduced in more than 100
countries worldwide with marked success, andthere have been calls in Japan in recent years for
quotas to be implemented as a way to increase
the number of women legislators. The 2018
Gender Equality Act did require parties in Japanto make an effort to field equal numbers of maleand female candidates. But because there wereno penalties introduced for a failure to do so,and because there are so many male incumbentsfrom the ruling coalition, the results in the mostrecent Upper House election in July 2022 fell wellshort of that at just 33.2 percent. For the ruling
LDP, which together with its coalition partner
Komeito now hold 146 out of 248 seats (roughly
59 percent), the ratio of female candidates was alamentable 23.2 percent (Komeito was even lower
at 20.8 percent). Calls for gender quotas in the
United States have been more sporadic. Richard
Reeves of Brookings Institution, for example,
writes that while Biden’s appointment of a moregender-balanced cabinet raised the country’s
gender equality rankings significantly, it will takequotas to improve the situation in Congress. He
believes that the institution of a quota, if appliedby law, would be found unconstitutional, so it is
up to the political parties to act.17 Here again,
examining best practices for the application of
quotas in the corporate and political fields could
offer useful lessons.

16. River Davis, “Despite Abe’s Push, Women Still Largely Absent from Japan Boards,” Bloomberg US Edition, July 21, 2022.
17. Richard V. Reeves, “Congress Needs Gender Parity Quotas,” Brookings Institution, April 21, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/
opinions/congress-needs-gender-parity-quotas/.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

Promoting Women in STEM
The final session of our dialogue took a deeper
dive into an issue that had been raised in the2021 meetings: the importance of increasing thenumbers of women pursuing STEM careers.
Throughout history, many women in STEM havemade critical scientific contributions that havechanged our understanding of the world aroundus. These women include Marie Curie—the only
person in history to have won Nobel Prizes in two
scientific fields—and more recent examples like
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna,
who were jointly recognized with a Nobel Prize
for their groundbreaking work on the gene editing method known as CRISPR, and Kizzmekia
Corbett, who played a key role in developing
the mRNA technology that led to the Moderna
COVID-19 vaccine, among others. Nonetheless,women remain underrepresented in STEM fields
in terms of leadership roles and recognition. In
fact, as of 2022, only 24 women had won a Nobel

Figure 4. Individual recipients of the Nobel Prize by gender,
1901–2022
218

213

Women Men

183

18

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90

2

Source: Nobel Prize website, https://www.nobelprize.org/

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Prize in the sciences out of 638 awarded, or lessthan 4 percent (see fig. 4).
In both the United States and Japan, the ratioof female students in undergraduate and graduate science and engineering programs is low, andamong them, the ratio of those who continue
on to become researchers in these fields is evensmaller. In the United States, although women
represent the majority of bachelor’s degree recipients in health and life sciences, only around one
in five undergraduate degree recipients in engineering or computer science are women.18 These
numbers have resulted in a smaller number ofwomen actually working in those fields. Japan has
similarly low ratios, with women representing
only around 6 percent of engineering researchers,
and only 7.5 percent of managers in the information and communications technology (ICT) field.
Even in the health sciences, women in Japan
have faced substantial barriers, as highlighted bya 2018 scandal where it was discovered that ten
leading medical schools were tampering withthe entrance exam scores to reduce the numberof female students admitted. Fortunately, thenumber of women entering medical school has
subsequently increased to over 40 percent (thatnumber is now over 50 percent in the UnitedStates),19 and in 2021, the percentage of women
who passed the medical school entrance exams
surpassed that of men.20 But once they do getin, they have few female role models or mentors
they can look to. Both countries continue tohave a poor track record in terms of the number of women in positions of leadership at academic medical institutions. A 2019 report by the
Association of American Medical Colleges foundthat women accounted for just 16 percent of medical school deans, 18 percent of department chairs,and 25 percent of full professors.21 In Japan, the18. Sapna Cheryan, Allison Master, and Andrew Meltzoff, “There Are Too Few Women in Computer Science andEngineering,” Scientific American, July 27, 2022, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-are-too-few-women-incomputer-science-and-engineering/.
19. Sumiyo Akazawa et al., “Women Physicians in Academic Medicine of Japan,” JMA Journal 5, no. 3 (July 15, 2022): 289–297,
https://www.jmaj.jp/detail.php?id=10.31662%2Fjmaj.2021-0116#fig2.
20.Kyodo News, “Women Overtake Men in Exam Pass Rate at Japan’s Medical Schools,” February 16, 2022, https://english.
kyodonews.net/news/2022/02/1c41b683f2e3-women-overtake-men-in-exam-pass-rate-at-japans-medical-schools.html. The
rates flipped back in 2022, however, with 13.1% of women and 14.2% of men passing.
21. Amy Paturel, “Where Are All the Women Deans?” AAMC News (June 11, 2019), https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/
where-are-all-women-deans.

20 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

percentage of full professorships in the medical
field held by female physicians in 2018 was under
10 percent.22 And these numbers were similar or
worse across the science and engineering fields.
This lack of representation signals to female students that academia and academic research posts
in STEM fields are not a viable career path forthem. And this is a problem not just for women
but for society as a whole. The female half of theworld’s brainpower is being underutilized in theessential areas of science and technology—areasthat increasingly affect the way we work and live.

Why Women in STEM Matters
Jobs in STEM are understood to be critical to the
future of the Japanese and American economies.
For example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics
estimates that jobs in STEM will grow by 10.5
percent from 2020 to 2030, as compared to 7.5
percent for non-STEM jobs.23 And in addition tohigh demand, those with degrees in STEM also
tend to earn substantially more.24 For women inparticular, there are many benefits of working in
the field of science, technology, engineering, andmathematics. Tech jobs in particular are more
likely to offer the potential to work from homeand enjoy greater job flexibility. It is also an area
where mid-career transitions and re-entry after
taking time off for parenting may be more practical than in other fields.
Since technology changes constantly, as long asrecurring education and retraining opportunities
are available, women can update their skills andreenter the workforce after an extended absence
more easily than in other fields. In addition, there
are many new companies in the field, which often
offer a more flexible and inclusive environment
than older, established corporations more set intheir ways. And because science, IT, and engineering require not just technical know-how but also
cross-disciplinary skills, a bird’s-eye view, management capabilities, and ethics, women can makean impact in the field even if they have initiallytrained in non-technical fields. It is also an area
where workers’ individual job performance andresults are recognized, allowing women to shine.
In this digital world, technology is impacting
everyone, but our discussions found tremendous
financial and power inequities between the creators and users of technology, and women canplay a role in addressing this issue. For example, the creators of technology that facilitates
the online ordering of food or goods have beenhighly successful, but their systems rely on delivery workers who receive low wages and no social
protections. And the use of AI to increase productivity at the expense of labor has been drawing
a growing backlash as well. Cambridge University
economist Diane Coyle, for example, calls for arethinking of “progress.” She writes, “Whatever
we mean by the economy growing, by things getting better, the gains will have to be more evenly
shared than in the recent past. An economy oftech millionaires or billionaires and gig workers,
with middle-income jobs undercut by automation, will not be politically sustainable.”25 It isessential that women’s voices be reflected in thatprocess of rethinking how technology shapes our
future digital society.

How to Improve Diversity andInclusion in STEM Education
The K-12 level is perhaps the most critical stage
in determining whether girls end up pursuing education and careers in STEM fields. It is
important to encourage self-confidence among

22. Kaori Kono, Takashi Watari, and Yasuharu Tokuda, “Assessment of Academic Achievement of Female Physicians in Japan,”
JAMA Network Open 3, no. 7 (July 2020), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7348686/. Indeed, the OECD
reported that as of 2020, Japan was last among 32 OECD nations in terms of female staff in tertiary education. See Kyodo
News, “Japan Ranked Last in Women Staff in Tertiary Education in 2020: OECD,” October 9, 2022, https://english.kyodonews.
net/news/2022/10/6c91120eada9-japan-ranked-last-in-women-staff-in-tertiary-education-in-2020-oecd.html.
23. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment in STEM Occupations,” https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/stem-employment.htm.
24. National Science Board, National Science Foundation, “The STEM Labor Force of Today,” August 2021, https://ncses.nsf.gov/
pubs/nsb20212/figure/LBR-12.
25. As quoted in David Rotman, “How to Solve AI’s Inequality Problem,” MIT Technology Review, April 19, 2022, https://www.
technologyreview.com/2022/04/19/1049378/ai-inequality-problem/.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

girls about their ability to do well in core subjects
like mathematics and science. It is also important
to ensure that teachers’ and parents’ unconscious(or conscious) biases do not get handed down toyoung children.
Part of the solution is to change the way thatsociety views STEM careers. In addition to dispelling the notion that science is a “man’s world”
or the fallacy that men are somehow genetically
predisposed to be better in math and science,
there is also the need to correct the perception of
STEM as a siloed field where you work alone in alab, when in reality it requires collaboration andcross-sectoral input to spur innovation. Girls needto see more role models in STEM and be exposed
to more information to have a better sense of thereality and variety of working in STEM fields.
One participant pointed to the example of a
US university, Harvey Mudd College, that redesigned its computer science course to focus onproblem-solving, examining questions such as
how to bring water to remote villages in Africa.
This was part of a successful initiative to substantially increase the number of women in their
computer science program (by 2016, more thanhalf of computer science majors in the school
were women).26 If you can reframe science andtechnology as a means to solve problems thatyoung women care about, then it provides greater
motivation for them to enter and continue in
STEM fields.
There are a number of programs being conducted with public- and private-sector support
that provide training to help teachers be more
effective advocates for STEM in schools. Intel,
for example, is targeting middle school girls to
encourage them to become innovators, and a
nonprofit in Japan, SKYLabo, introduces Design
Thinking to high school girls through workshopsthat feature STEM professionals from major
corporations such as Panasonic and Uniqlo.
STEM camps and other initiatives also help make21

science and technology more approachable and“demystify” STEM for girls and can encourage
girls to advocate for themselves and have a voiceof their own.
Finally, the role of universities is also vitally
important. The presence of and mentoring byfemale professors can play a decisive role inencouraging young women to pursue a careerin STEM. It was pointed out that statements ofintent are not enough; universities need to havea full-scale, data-based articulation of their institutions’ vision for recruitment, retention, andadvancement of women in STEM. That requires
capacity-building within institutions to ensurethat the vision is carried out long-term and isbased on these institutions’ ongoing self-reflection
and analysis of what is and is not working.

Promoting Equity and Inclusion in
STEM Fields
In both the United States and Japan, there are
a number of government initiatives to promote
STEM by and for women at various levels. On the
US side, for example, there is a Women in STEM
Caucus in Congress, founded by Rep. Chrissy
Houlahan (2021 US-Japan Women Leaders
Dialogue participant). And in recent years,
the US Congress passed the Building Blocks of
STEM Act, which provides National Science
Foundation funding for research on how earlychildhood education can better encourage girls’
participation in STEM and for the developmentof gender-inclusive computer science programs.
The Japanese government, meanwhile, has initiatives such as the Japan Science and Technology
Agency’s Support for Female Students in
Choosing Science Courses program that targets
junior high and high school girls, creating opportunities for them to meet with woman researchers and engineers. On the business front, former
Minister Noda has been promoting femtech and26. Oliver Staley, “Harvey Mudd College Took on Gender Bias and Now More than Half Its Computer-Science Majors Are
Women,” Quartz, August 22, 2016, https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bias-and-now-morethan-half-its-computer-science-majors-are-women/. See also Harvey Mudd College, “Harvey Mudd Launches BRAID
Initiative to Increase Diversity in Computer Science,” September 24, 2014, https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2014/09/24/
harvey-mudd-launches-initiative-increase-diversity-computer-science/.

22 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

menotech as areas for greater investment and she
also chairs the Femtech Parliamentary League.
It would be helpful to compare notes in greater
detail on what has and has not been effective todate in the two countries.
Continuing education and reskilling are vitalfor women’s advancement in general. This applies
to women who want to reenter the field after
pausing their careers, and also to women who
may not have started in technology-related areas
when they were first recruited but see that as apotential path moving forward. Opportunities
to network with other women in the field, insimilar industries and from other countries, arealso important.
On the business front, women entrepreneurs
need greater encouragement and investmentin their work. Although the number of women
breaking into VC in both countries is on therise, VC remains heavily dominated by men.
The importance of diversity needs to be stressedboth to those providing funds and to the startups themselves: Diversity = Profitability. Many
studies have shown that companies with greater
diversity on their boards and in management
are more profitable, so there is a financial
incentive to promote inclusion.27 Moreover, therecent business focus on ESG (equity, sustainability, and governance) and the SDGs (particularly in Japan) has opened up new opportunities to empower women and to invest in womenas human capital.
As in all of our sessions during the 2022 dialogue, the topic of work-life balance was raised
again as being critical not only in creating inclusive environments at work that allow women
to advance and/or return to the workplace, butalso in terms of ensuring that a career in STEM
is attractive to young women. The need for parents to teach sons how to contribute around thehome in childcare, cooking, cleaning, etc., wasmentioned as an important way to change thenorms around the division of unpaid labor in
the home.

And finally, it was noted that women need
to identify the barriers to their advancement
and seek solutions themselves. This can include
organizing campaigns to ensure women are nominated and selected for leadership roles in professional associations, for example, or looking forand correcting hidden biases in the language ofrecruitment materials.

US-Japan Collaboration for Women’s
Empowerment
As outlined above, the situation facing women in
the United States and Japan is marked by moreconvergence than divergence, as we face common challenges and share many similar objectives. The participants in our dialogue identified
many areas where further US-Japan exchanges
and collaborations could help improve the statusof gender equity and equality in our two countries and beyond.
First and foremost, they strongly recommended that collaboration on gender equity beplaced squarely on the bilateral US-Japan collaborative agenda. At past summit meetings, thetopic of women’s empowerment has been raised,
but primarily in the context of supporting education for girls or maternal health in developing
countries and there was no mention of how
our countries could work together to improveequality and equity at home. The US-Japan
CoRe Partnership announced in 2021, for example, addressed cooperation on a wide range ofissues, from the digital economy to global healthand climate change. But it lacked an indicationof how these fields can be pursued in a way that
promotes a more equitable distribution of thebenefits of that partnership. It is important thata gendered perspective on the CoRe Partnershipbe developed and introduced to ensure that itreflects the interests and insights of all membersof society. JCIE took the first steps toward thisgoal following the dialogue as we worked with

27. See, for example, Paul Gompers and Silpa Kovvali, “The Other Diversity Dividend,” Harvard Business Review (July–August2018), https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-other-diversity-dividend/.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

the US State Department to insert language on
US-Japan cooperation and exchanges on genderequality into the documents for the May 2022
summit between Prime Minister Kishida andPresident Biden (see Epilogue).
What forms could expanded US-Japan partnership and collaboration on women’s empowerment take? Our discussions have identified
a number of areas where further research anddialogue would be useful to better understandthe impact of government and corporate policies
to improve the wellbeing of women and families
in both countries. Topics include such areas as
how telework and telemedicine can be effectively
maintained and integrated into post-pandemic
life; how disparities in corporate benefits such as
paid family and medical leave can be alleviated;
how the ratio of non-regular employees in thefemale labor force can be reduced; how training
and reskilling can be targeted to help womenenter better-paying jobs or create on-ramps for
women who have been out of the labor market
due to family caregiving obligations; and how
government policy or peer pressure from companies’ partners and affiliates might be applied to
improve women’s career advancement and economic security. On the educational front, exploring how Title IX has been implemented and theimpact it has had in the United States could be
useful for Japanese policymakers. Sharing bestpractices on the recruitment, retention, and promotion of talented women in universities could
be another useful exchange.
As noted above, the recent business focus
on ESG and the SDGs provides incentives fora greater focus on women’s empowerment.
There are opportunities to foster more bilateral
studies and discussions on the use of quotas
and targets regarding diversity on boards andin top management in both countries. Anotherimportant area for bilateral cooperation
could be the promotion of networking among
Japanese and American women entrepreneurs

23

and VC investors who focus on supporting
women entrepreneurs.
US-Japan dialogue and exchange among
women in STEM-related businesses could
provide useful opportunities for these women
to expand their networks and explore mutually beneficial opportunities. For example, thetwo countries could provide opportunities for
women leaders in the STEM fields to interact
with younger generations of women to show
them what a potential career path in STEM
might look like. And both countries should be
encouraged to invest more in women-led businesses, including in the femtech field.
Looking beyond the business sector, the twocountries should continue to pursue greater
US-Japan dialogue and research on promoting
women in STEM. The two countries have muchto learn from one another on how best to encourage girls to study STEM, how to effectively retain
and promote women researchers, and how to provide recurrent and reskilling educational opportunities that contribute to a more viable career
path for these women in science, technology, andengineering. Bilateral academic exchanges andfellowship opportunities should be offered thattarget women in STEM.
Finally, it is critical that both Japan and theUnited States continue to help one another work
toward becoming more representative democracies that include women’s voices at all levelsof government. The sharing of lessons learned,
empowering frameworks, and simple words ofmutual encouragement through our dialogue
has already made an impact on the participants,
and we hope to continue and expand this important network. In particular, the cross-sectoral
US-Japan dialogues that draw on the experiencesof women in politics, business, academia, policy research, and media have proven to provide
unique perspectives and insights, offering solutions and innovations that can be shared acrossvarious fields, and should be continued.

EPILOGUE

Following the conclusion of the 2022 Dialogue, several developments took place thatare directly relevant to our discussions.

Women on the Agenda
JCIE/USA followed up on the group’s recommendation and worked with the Japan
Desk at the State Department to get gender equity issues onto the agenda at the May
summit meeting between Prime Minister Kishida and President Biden. As a result,the issue was mentioned in the Joint Statement and in the Fact Sheet on the CoRe
partnership as follows:

Joint Statement:“Prime Minister Kishida and President Biden, recognizing that the pandemic has
made promoting gender equity more important than ever, concurred that ensuring that all people, regardless of gender identity, can achieve their full potential
is both a moral and strategic imperative, critical to every aspect of society andthe economy. The two leaders also emphasized the importance of preventing
and addressing gender-based violence, including conflict-related sexual violence.”

Fact Sheet on the U.S.-Japan Competitiveness andResilience (CoRe) Partnership:“Expanding and Renewing our Partnership: The United States and Japan committed to strengthen further our vibrant people-to-people ties by expanding collaboration and participation in research projects and international exchange
programs. Our exchange programs will continue to distribute the benefits of
the CoRe Partnership inclusively and equitably, to empower women in oursocieties. Exchange programs have engaged civil society, and the public andprivate sectors to encourage women’s role in the business sector, government,
and STEM fields.”
JCIE will continue to work to push our governments to flesh these ideas out
more fully and to put concrete plans and funding toward these goals.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

25

In-Person Dialogue in Tokyo
Co-chair Diana DeGette travelled to Japan at the end of May with the Congressional
Study Group, and before those events started, she spent a day with JCIE. Participantsfrom the Dialogue gathered for a roundtable discussion and then a lunch meeting
was held for Rep. DeGette and Minister Seiko Noda, along with a handful of otherparticipants. The discussions focused on recent developments and the upcoming
elections in both countries, as well as next steps for promoting US-Japan cooperation on gender equity.

Japan’s Upper House Election and Cabinet Reshuffle
Japan went to the polls in July 2022 in the wake of the tragic and shocking killing offormer Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was a staunch supporter of US-Japan relations and a strong advocate of women’s empowerment. A record number of womencandidates were running for the Upper House this year—181 in all, which was 33.2
percent of all candidates. Of those, 35 were victorious, bringing the total numberof female members to 63, or 25.4 percent of members (up from 22.8 percent). The
previous number was 56, so that represents a gain of 7 seats. However, shortly after
the election, Prime Minister Kishida reshuffled his cabinet, in large part as a result of
disclosures regarding ties between the Unification Church and Japanese politicians.
Unfortunately, the result was a drop in the number of female cabinet members froman already low three down to two. Minister Seiko Noda was among those who losther post, and Kishida’s appointment of a male Diet member to take her place as
Minister in Charge of Women’s Empowerment and of Policies Related to Declining
Birthrate as well as Minister of State for Gender Equality did not go unnoticed by thedomestic and international press.

Survey Reports

In preparation for the second session of the 2022 US-Japan
Women Leaders Dialogue, surveys were conducted in the UnitedStates and Japan of programs and organizations that exist ineach country to encourage women’s political engagement andleadership. These surveys were intended as a way to share bestpractices and also as a way to identify gaps. For the US report,
we asked Jean Sinzdak, Associate Director of the Center for
American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of
Politics, Rutgers University, to provide her insights into thestate of the field. On the Japan side, a survey was prepared by
JCIE/Japan staff, with assistance from the ICHIKAWA Fusae
Center for Women and Governance. Both surveys are included
here, and Part II of the Japan survey, which lists relevant organizations, can be accessed online on the JCIE website.

27

Training Women for
Political Leadership:
An Overview of Programs andOrganizations in the United States
Jean Sinzdak
Center for American Women and Politics
Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
February 2022

Current Status of Women’s Political
Representation in the United States
Women in the United States have made significant progress towards political equality. Notably,in 2020 the country elected the first woman andwoman of color as vice president, Kamala Harris,and the past two election cycles have seen record
numbers of women running for state legislative,
statewide executive, and Congressional seats; thenumbers of women now serving in those offices
are also at record highs.
Despite this progress, there is substantial work
to be done to achieve gender equity in politicalrepresentation. Men continue hold approximately 7 in 10 elected offices at every level ofgovernment around the country. The highest
percentage of women serving in public office isat the state legislative level, where women hold31.3 percent of the seats nationwide. At the federal level, 27.1 percent of Congressional seats

are held by women; 24 women serve in the US
Senate (24 percent) and 121 women serve in theHouse (27.8 percent). Women hold 31 percent ofstatewide offices, including the 9 women who
serve as state governors (which matches the previous record of women holding governorships atany one time). At the local level (in cities withpopulations over 10,000), women hold 30.5 percent of elected seats.1
The record-breaking election cycles of the past
two years were jumpstarted by the outcome of the2016 presidential election. It is worth noting thatthe story of women’s successes in the past two election cycles differed along party lines. Democratic
women were largely responsible for the increases
in women candidates and officeholders in the2018 election, but Republican women reboundedfrom 2018 losses to account for the majority ofincreases in women’s candidacies and officeholding in 2020.2

1. Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP). 2022. “Current Numbers.” New Brunswick, NJ: Center for American
Women and Politics, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University-New Brunswick. https://cawp.rutgers.edu/facts/
current-numbers (Accessed January 19, 2022).
2. Dittmar, Kelly. 2021. Measuring Success: Women in 2020 Legislative Elections. Center for American Women and Politics,
Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.

28 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

The Need for Intervention
While women have been running in record numbers, they still remain significantly underrepresented in the overall pool of candidates: women
were less than 36 percent of all nominees forcongressional and state legislative offices in 2020.3
To increase the numbers and diversity of womenrunning for office, efforts must be intentional.
Getting more women to run for public officepresents particular challenges. Political science
research shows that women need an extra push
to consider themselves ready to run for office. In
a study comparing women’s and men’s pathways
to the state legislatures, the Center for American
Women and Politics (CAWP) found that womenneed more support and encouragement to run for
office than men. Twenty-nine percent of womenlegislators reported that “an organization played aparticularly important role in getting them to run
for their current office,” compared with 19 percent
of male legislators. Nearly half of male legislators
are “self-starters” who report that seeking office
was entirely their idea, compared to only about
one-quarter of women. In contrast, most women(51 percent) were recruited, compared to only 28
percent of men. In addition, women are more
likely than their male colleagues to have attended
a campaign training or workshop, suggesting thattraining support may be critical to increasing thenumber of women in office.4
Women are also less likely to be asked to run for
office. A study by Professor Richard Fox of Loyola
Marymount University showed that women wereless likely than their male counterparts to havereceived a suggestion to run for office, particularly from formal political actors such as electedor party officials. Fox’s research shows that among
similarly situated professionals in fields (suchas law or business) that have produced elected

officials frequently in the past, 36 percent of
women, compared with 57 percent of men, seethemselves as qualified or very qualified to run
for office.5
A recent study on children and political ambition illustrated that girls are socialized to have
limited political ambition. A team of researchers
analyzed data on 1,600 children around the country and found “that children not only perceive
politics to be a male-dominated space, but withage, girls increasingly see political leadership asa ‘man’s world,’ ” and noted that the differences
started at younger ages and grew more acute as
boys’ and girls’ political knowledge and understanding grew. Schools, the media, families, andpeers were among the forces reinforcing theseperceptions as they helped socialize the concepts of the male-dominated world of politics.
Ultimately, the study found girls are less likely to
see traditional politics as a place for them to lead.6
As the authors note, this research suggests thatefforts to shift the culture and change perceptionsof who can serve as public leaders must start at
the earliest ages. Programs that aim to shift thenarrative of politics as exclusively a male domain
and that help girls build their leadership skills andactively participate in political spaces could havea tremendous impact on the diversity of representation in future generations.
The solutions to barriers to women’s politicalparticipation as candidates and officeholders are
to intervene at younger ages, to routinely andconsistently ask more women to run, to train
them so they feel qualified to run, and to provide
resources and support at various points on thepolitical engagement spectrum. On the positiveside, early indications from recent elections showthat women were less likely to “wait their turn” torun for office. Many of those who ran and lost in
2018 went on to run again in 2020, another trend

3. Dittmar, Kelly. 2021. Measuring Success: Women in 2020 Legislative Elections. Center for American Women and Politics,
Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
4. Carroll, Susan J., and Kira Sanbonmatsu. 2013. More Women Can Run: Gender and Pathways to the State Legislatures. New
York: Oxford University Press.
5. Fox, Richard L. 2003. Gender, Political Ambition, and the Initial Decision to Run for Office. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for
American Women and Politics, 2003.
6. Bos, A., Greenlee, J., Holman, M., Oxley, Z., & Lay, J. 2021. “This One’s for the Boys: How Gendered Political Socialization
Limits Girls’ Political Ambition and Interest.” American Political Science Review, 1-18.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialoguethat indicates that women may be more successful
in coming years in overcoming some of the key
barriers to running for office.7 A combination ofactive interventions along with cultural shifts andstructural changes may herald an even greater
increase in women’s participation in politics as
candidates and officeholders in years to come.

Overview of Organizations and Programs Aimed at Increasing Political
Engagement of Women and Girls in
the United States
The modern women’s political movement hasgone through important growth over the past
several years. Some women’s organizations,
including the Feminist Majority and the National
Organization for Women, have operated for
decades, but in recent years, numerous organizations with a focus on advancing women’s politicalrepresentation have been founded. Significantly,
many organizations are focused on diversifying
the cadre of women engaged in political leadership, including racial and ethnic diversity.
The increase in women’s political engagement
over the past five years has helped expand thenumber of programs and organizations dedicatedto women’s political advancement. Democratic
and progressive women who were particularly
motivated during the 2018 election cycle formed
many new, largely grassroots groups focused on
Democratic and progressive women’s politicalempowerment. Republican women counteredthat effort during the 2020 election cycle withsome new organizations and candidate recruitment efforts specifically aimed at reversing thebackslide in the numbers of Republican women
elected officials.
The types of organizations focused on politicalparticipation of women in this country can bebroadly categorized as follows:29

1. Campaign trainings for women, including partisan
programs (both within the formal political party
structure or adjacent to it), ideologically based
programs (for example, progressive, conservative,
or focused on one issue area or set of issue areas)or targeted constituency programs, and nonpartisan programs
2. Non-gender-specific campaign trainings
3. Organizations for women’s political empowerment
4. Women’s political action committees (PACs)
5. Organizations of women elected officials
6. Political appointments projects
7. Women’s legislative caucuses
8. Youth civic leadership programs specifically forgirls and young women

While many organizations have multiple missions or offer programming across these categories, the categories offer a framework for better
understanding the landscape of programming
and resources available to women seeking to get
more politically engaged in the United States.
Additionally, most of the programming and otherefforts to engage more women in politics andgovernment operate outside any formal political
apparatus or party structure, managed by nonprofit or volunteer grassroots organizations.

Campaign Trainings for Women
Currently, over 120 organizations on national,
state and local levels provide campaign trainings
targeted directly at women candidates. Most
campaign trainings cover the key topics that
help women become successful candidates foroffice in the United States, including developing a
campaign plan and assembling a campaign team,fundraising, communications and message development, digital campaign strategies (including
social media), working with the political parties,
and mobilizing voters. Some offer specific programs based on their constituency, such as running in an urban versus a rural area or running

7. Dittmar, Kelly. 2019. Unfinished Business: Women Running in 2018 and Beyond. Center for American Women and Politics,
Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.

30 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

for a judicial seat (judges are only elected in somestates, not all, and those races typically have distinct campaigning rules to avoid ethical conflictsof interest).
In terms of audience, the trainings can bedivided into three general categories:
1. Partisan programs (both within the formal political party structure or adjacent to it)
2. Ideological (progressive, conservative, focused on
one issue area) or targeted constituency programs
3. Nonpartisan programs

Partisan Campaign Training Programs
The political parties in the United States offer campaign trainings for their candidates. For example,
the Democratic National Committee (DNC) andthe Association of State Democratic Committees(ASDC) run a Best Practices Institute that provides trainings to activists and volunteers, party
leaders and staff, students and youth organizers,
candidates and campaign staff. The Republican
National Committee offers political education
programs that provide candidates, campaign
managers, and staff with the tools and information needed to organize and run campaigns.
Usually these are not gender-specific but open
to any candidates who affiliate with the party. At
various times, political parties have recognized
the need to acknowledge gender diversity, so
there have been efforts to recruit and train women
within formal party structures, but by and large,
the political parties focus on recruiting any viablecandidates. Party-adjacent organizations such as
the National Federation of Republican Womenand the National Federation of Democratic
Women both offer education and training programs for women within their parties.
Outside of formal party structures, a numberof independent but partisan nonprofit organizations recruit and train women to run for
office. One of the largest on the Democratic side,
Emerge America, recruits and trains Democratic
women to run for office, focusing on providing
both national and state-based training as well asbuilding a national network of program alumnae,
staff, boards, and volunteers who can help support women through their candidacies at every
level and once they are elected. Founded in 2002
in California, there are currently Emerge chaptersin 27 states around the country. The Republicancounterpart (and predecessor to Emerge America)
is the Excellence in Public Service Series. Founded
in 1989 as the Richard G. Lugar Excellence in
Public Service Series in Indiana, this network ofstate-based programs encourages, mentors, andprepares selected Republican women leaders toseek new levels of involvement in government
and politics. Other Excellence in Public Service
Series programs include the Anne Anstine Seriesin Pennsylvania, the Lincoln Series in Illinois,
and the Dodie Londen Series in Arizona.
Both Emerge America and the Excellence in
Public Service Series focus on state-level networks
and trainings to better prepare women to run
within the context of their own states or regions.
Also central to the programming model for bothis that their programs are typically 6–10 months
long with cohorts of 25–35 people, allowing them
to offer more in-depth, personalized training
and to provide more opportunity for networking
among cohort members.

Ideological or Special Interest Group
Programs
Many organizations focused on campaign training follow ideological guideposts, only trainingor supporting women candidates with a particular policy position or set of positions. The
National Women’s Political Caucus, for example, recruits, trains and supports pro-choice
women candidates for elected and appointed
offices at all levels of government regardless ofparty affiliation. Chapters around the country
offer trainings.
The Women’s Public Leadership Network(WPLN) is a nonprofit organization dedicatedto educating, organizing, and inspiring women
to seek public office. While nonpartisan, WPLN
aims to remove barriers and provide support

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

specifically for center- and right-leaning womenseeking elected office and appointments.
Run For Something works exclusively with progressive millennials ages 35 or younger who are
first- or second-time candidates running for local
offices (such as school board, city council, county
commissioner). While not specifically for women,
Run For Something offers a model for creating
strategies aimed at addressing a specific segmentof the population. As the organization notes:“Run for Something will help recruit and support
young diverse progressives to run for down-ballot
races in order to build a bench for the future—thefolks we support now could be possible membersof the House, Senate, and maybe even President
one day.”8

Nonpartisan Campaign Trainings for
Women
Some campaign trainings are strictly nonpartisan
and are open to any and all women interested
in running for office. The approach for these
programs generally follows a “wide net” model,
aiming to promote democratic inclusion and thegreatest possible diversity among public leaders,
as opposed to those programs that recruit from a
specific subset of the population, either by partisan background, ideological beliefs, or geographic
location, or some other set of criteria.
The Center for American Women and Politics(CAWP) at Rutgers University created Ready toRun® in 1998 to address the underrepresentationof women in New Jersey politics for two reasons.
At the time, New Jersey was consistently near thebottom of all states for women’s representation instate legislatures. In addition, research demonstrated that practical intervention was importantfor helping more women feel inspired to launch
campaigns. The New Jersey program now serves
as a flagship model for other states, and theReady to Run® National Network has partners in
20 other states and the territory of Puerto Rico.
The program aims to provide a comprehensive

31

curriculum that incorporates the political culture and climate of the locale and uses state andlocal campaign experts to highlight the specifics
of running in a particular state or region, and it
is open to women regardless of political party
affiliation or position on policy issues. One lesson
that has been clear: active intervention is crucial
to changing the political climate of a state. When
Ready to Run® was first launched in New Jersey,
the state ranked 39th in the nation for womenserving in its legislature. As of January 2022, theGarden State is ranked 26th, after having beenranked as high as 10th in 2012 (the numbers for
women’s representation have not declined for
New Jersey; other states have increased their
numbers to surpass the state). CAWP also developed a special Diversity Initiative to complement
Ready to Run®. The Center was proactive in raising funds and organizing advisory committees
of women leaders in underrepresented minority
communities to develop pre-conference programs to address the special challenges faced
by women of color, including overcoming cultural barriers, finding mentors and role models,
and representing a diverse electorate. The New
Jersey–based Diversity Initiative comprises three
separate programs: Run Sister Run: Women of
the African Diaspora Changing the PoliticalLandscape; Rising Stars: Educating Asian
American Women for Politics; and ELLA Wins
(Elections & Leadership Latina Academy). Since
the inception of the Diversity Initiative, fully halfof all participants in the New Jersey Ready to Run®
program have been women of color. The Diversity
Initiative model has been useful for replication instates with diverse populations.
Other nonpartisan training organizations
include Vote Run Lead, which recently launcheda campaign to get more women to run for statelegislatures in every state and offers campaign
trainings in several states, and She Should Run,
which offers online training and professional
development for women who are consideringrunning for office. The Campaign School at Yale

8. Run For Something. “Our 2019-2020 Strategic Plan.” https://runforsomething.medium.com/run-for-somethings-2019-2020strategic-plan-a272e5633849 (Accessed January 15, 2022).

32 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

University is a nonpartisan, issue-neutral leadership program whose mission is to increase thenumber and influence of women in elected andappointed office in the United States and aroundthe globe.
In addition to the national organizations
mentioned above, state and local organizations
work to educate and train women to run in
their communities. Examples include Eleanor’s
Legacy, which recruits, trains, and supports
pro-choice Democratic women to run for stateand local office throughout New York. Colorado
50/50, which was founded in the spring of 2017,is dedicated to achieving gender parity at all levels of office in the state. The Wyoming Women’s
Legislative Caucus offers an annual Leap into
Leadership training for women in the state.
More examples can be found here.
Crucially, the number of available programs
varies widely by state, so access to training isuneven. National organizations like those listed
above are filling some of these gaps, but ideally
access to campaign training would be greater
across the board.

Campaign Trainings (non-genderspecific)
Within the campaign training landscape, there
are a number of non-gender-specific campaign
trainings, mostly run by nonprofit organizations.
Some are ideological or party-based, but others
are strictly nonpartisan, such as the Campaign
Management Institute run by the Center for
Congressional and Presidential Studies at
American University.
Some organizations focus on elevating theirtarget constituencies in public leadership. The
Veterans Campaign, for example, offers a nonpartisan candidate training to inspire and train
more former members of the military to run
for office around the country. The founder, SethLynn, is a former service member who had begun
a post-military career in public policy and wasdisappointed by how few current elected officials

had served in the military. Recognizing the needto reach this population, he founded VeteransCampaign with that mission. The VeteransCampaign offers training on how to get involved
in civic leadership, laying the groundwork for a
campaign or advocacy initiative, message development and communications, fundraising, grassroots operations, digital media, and specific challenges, opportunities, and techniques for veterans& military affiliates. Importantly, participants
have the opportunity to hear firsthand accountsof distinguished veterans who have made thetransition to civic and political leadership, a crucial piece in helping convince this population toconsider careers in “second service.” Their candidate training program is non-gender-specific, butthey do offer Women’s Programs aimed at womenmilitary veterans and military spouses and havepartnered with the Center for American Womenand Politics on this program in the past.
Other national organizations with a target constituency include New American Leaders, which
provides campaign trainings to prepare first- andsecond-generation Americans to use their power
and potential in elected office. LGBTQ Victory
Institute offers candidate and campaign trainings
with comprehensive, nonpartisan best practices
to present and future LGBTQ candidates, campaign staff, and community leaders.
At the state level, there are also numerous
examples of organizations that offer training
for their constituents with the goal of advancing those who will be supportive of their policy
positions and issues. For example, the New Jersey
chapter of the AFL-CIO, one of the largest labor
union organizations in the country, offers candidate training for union members in the state.
The Arkansas Farm Bureau, together with the
Arkansas Chamber of Commerce, offers campaign training to help those in the business andfarming communities to run for office.
More examples can be found here.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

Women’s PACs
Political action committees (PACs) are organizations formed for the express purpose of raisingmoney to support or defeat candidates for public
office. Most PACs represent business, labor or
ideological interests.9 While the number fluctuates from year to year, as of January 2022 there
are approximately 100 national and state-based
PACs dedicated to supporting women candidates
specifically. Most are either party-based, primarily supporting women from Democratic or
Republican parties, or ideologically based, supporting women who either support a particularcause or lean one way or the other on the political spectrum. The number of PACs supporting
Republican women has grown in the past few
years, but Democratic or progressive-leaning
PACs still far outnumber them.
The organization widely considered to be thestandard-bearer for political action committees
supporting women’s representation is EMILY’s
List. EMILY stands for Early Money is Like Yeast(It Makes the Dough Rise). The saying is a reference to a convention of political fundraisingthat receiving major donations early in a race ishelpful in attracting other, later donors. Founded
in 1985 by activist Ellen Malcolm, it is solely forpro-choice Democratic women running for officeat the federal, state, and local levels. It remains thelargest women’s PAC in the country, to date raising $700 million for women candidates.10 As partof its overall strategy, EMILY’s List also works
on candidate recruitment and voter outreachefforts in addition to fundraising. While not thefirst PAC founded to support women candidates,
because of its size and reach, EMILY’s List serves
as a model for a number of smaller state and local
PACs around the country.

33

Value In Electing Women Political Action
Committee (VIEWPAC) was founded in 1997 by
women Republican members of US Congress andprofessional women to help elect qualified, viable
Republican women to Congress. VIEWPAC is
exclusively dedicated to protecting and increasing the number of Republican women in the
US House and US Senate. VIEWPAC’s goal is tostrategically provide financial support where andwhen it is needed most; whether it be for a vulnerable incumbent or a competitive candidate. Since
VIEWPAC began, it has directly contributed andhelped to raise over $20 million for Republican
women running for Congress.11 Another relatively new Republican PAC is Elevate PAC(E-PAC). The 2018 election cycle saw a decline
in the number of Republican women serving in
US Congress. When closer analysis indicatedthat Republican women were struggling to win
primary elections, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik
launched E-PAC to support top Republican female
candidates in primaries across the country.12 Thisis another example of where early support andactive intervention may make a crucial differencein outcomes. Notably, Republican women had
a successful 2020 election year, increasing their
numbers in Congress and state legislatures. While
there are several factors at play, the support andattention from prominent Republican womenand organizations was certainly a factor in theirsuccess.
In recent years, there has also been an increase
in PACs aimed at recruiting more diverse poolsof women to run for office. Higher Heights for
America PAC is the only political action committee exclusively dedicated to electing moreprogressive Black women at the federal andstatewide levels and as mayors in the 100 mostpopulated US cities. According to their website,
Higher Heights PAC has helped secure the largest

9. OpenSecrets. 2022. “What is a PAC?” Washington, DC: OpenSecrets. https://www.opensecrets.org/political-actioncommittees-pacs/what-is-a-pac (Accessed January 15, 2022).
10. EMILY’s List. “About Us.” Washington, DC: EMILY’s List. https://store.emilyslist.org/pages/about-us (Accessed January 15,2022).
11. Value in Electing Women PAC (VIEWPAC). “Some Victories.” Alexandria, VA: Value in Electing Women PAC. https://
viewpac.org/ (Accessed January 15, 2022).
12. Elevate PAC. (E-PAC) “About E-PAC.” Glen Falls, NY: Elevate PAC. https://elevate-pac.com/about/ (Accessed January 15,2022).

34 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

number of Black women to ever simultaneously
serve in Congress; send the first Black woman
to the US Senate in 20 years; elect more Black
women to serve as mayors for the country’s 100
most populated cities; and select the first Black
woman to win a major party nomination for agovernor’s office.13 Another example is PODER
PAC, a political action committee working toincrease the number of Democratic, pro-choice
Latinas serving in Congress. Founded in 2008,
PODER PAC’s strategy is to highlight Democratic
Latina federal candidates, connect candidates
with a national network of Latinas leaders, andraise early money so that Latina candidates
become viable contenders.14
Recognizing the need to recruit younger
women for political office, Women Under Forty
PAC (WUF PAC) supports the efforts of women
under forty from all political parties who are running for Congress and the state legislatures. Vote
Mama PAC, founded in 2019, is the first PAC in
the country dedicated to increasing the politicalpower of Democratic mothers through direct
financial support, mentorship, and endorsements.
More examples of women’s PACs can befound here.

Organizations of Women Elected
Officials
As their numbers have grown over the years, so
have organizations of women elected officials.
These organizations play a variety of roles; someserve as networking hubs, while others offer leadership skill-building and mentorship opportunities. Yet others work together on specific policy
initiatives and legislative priorities. The two maintypes of organizations are women’s legislative

caucuses and membership organizations for
women elected officials.

Women’s Legislative Caucuses
Within legislatures, caucuses are informal, voluntary organizations of members that exist to discuss
ideas and possibly to pursue policy development,
research, or education. Legislative caucuses are
exclusive to members of that legislature. Scholar
Anna Mahoney notes: “Women’s caucuses insideinstitutions that are traditionally dominated bymen provide a safe space for marginalized legislators to support each other and develop initiatives
apart from those determined by committees andparties. By participating in bipartisan caucuses,
members develop relationships and skills thatassist them in accomplishing all their legislative
goals. Caucuses allow legislators to express shared
identities, develop expertise, and become better
advocates for key constituencies. Finally, caucuses provide leadership opportunities and arecorrelated with an increase in women’s advancement to formal leadership positions.”15
At the federal level, the Congressional
Caucus for Women’s Issues is a bipartisan
membership organization within the House ofRepresentatives committed to advancing women’s interests in Congress. Founded in 1977, theCaucus has worked on legislation that impacts
the lives of women and children, including the
Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Family andMedical Leave Act, and the Violence Against
Women Act.16
There are currently about 20 women’s caucusesin state legislatures around the country. The mission, formal structure, and levels of activity vary
widely from state to state. Some caucuses primarily
pursue specific legislation that will be supportive of

13. Higher Heights for America PAC. “About Us.” New York, NY: Higher Heights for America PAC. https://www.
higherheightsforamericapac.org/about-us/ (Accessed January 15, 2022).
14. PODER PAC. “Our Strategy.” Bethesda, MD: PODER PAC. http://www.poderpac.com/our-strategy.html (Accessed January
15, 2022).
15. Mahoney, Anna. 2017. “Creating Women’s Caucuses in State Legislatures.” Cambridge, MA: Scholars Strategy Network.
https://scholars.org/contribution/creating-womens-caucuses-state-legislatures (Accessed January 10, 2022).
16. Women’s Congressional Policy Institute. 2019. “Caucus History & Accomplishments.” Washington, DC: Women’s Congressional
Policy Institute. https://www.wcpinst.org/our-work/the-womens-caucus/caucus-history-and-accomplishments/ (Accessed
January 20, 2022).

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

women, while others focus on archival preservation and leadership development or networking.17
The Hawaii Women’s Legislative Caucus sponsors
a package of bills during each legislative session; in
2021 the package included bills relating to women’s health, preventing violence against women,
and supporting women in the workplace.18 The
Conference of Women Legislators of the Illinois
General Assembly works on empowering all
women in the state through a series of initiatives,
including educational scholarships for womenin Illinois, a civic leadership program for college
women, and a partnership with the Girl Scouts
to teach its members about public service. The
Wyoming Women’s Legislative Caucus offers regular gatherings, a speakers bureau, candidate development, and an intern/aide program to encourage
more Wyoming women to run for office.
A list of women’s legislative caucuses can befound here.

Membership Organizations for WomenElected Officials
Organizations of women elected officials largely
provide professional development and networking opportunities and promote the leadershipand advancement of their members. The Women’s
Legislative Network of the National Conference
for State Legislatures is a professional development organization that includes every female
state legislator in the 50 states, United States territories, and the District of Columbia, and defines
its mission as “promot[ing] the participation,
empowerment, and leadership of women legislators.” The National Organization of Black Elected
Legislative Women (NOBEL Women) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization primarily composed of current and former black women statelegislators as well as many appointed officials.
NOBEL Women notes that it was “[o]riginallyestablished in 1985 as a national organization
to increase and promote the presence of black

35

women in government… [and] in recent years
has expanded its vision to serve as a global voice
to address a myriad of issues affecting the livesof all women.” The Women Mayors Leadership
Alliance of the US Conference of Mayors
encourages and develops involvement and leadership potential for women mayors within the
Conference of Mayors, as well as offering networking opportunities for women mayors. Other
organizations include: the National Foundation
for Women Legislators, Women in Government,
and Women of NACo Leadership Network(National Association of Counties).
Additional examples can be found here.

Organizations for Women’s Political
Empowerment
In addition to campaign training and fundraisingfor candidates, numerous organizations at thenational, state, and local levels work to promotewomen’s political empowerment and engagement
in various ways. Strategies deployed by these organizations include research and public education,
civic engagement, voter outreach, and recruitment.

Research and Public Education
The Center for American Women and Politics(CAWP) at Rutgers University is the oldest andmost definitive source of data and research on
women’s political status in the United States.
Nationally recognized as the leading source ofscholarly research and current data about women’s political participation in the United States,
CAWP’s mission is to promote greater knowledge
and understanding about the role of women in
American politics, enhance women’s influence inpublic life, and expand the diversity of women inpolitics and government.
Since its founding in 1971, CAWP has collected
and made publicly available the data on women

17. Mahoney, Anna. 2017. “Creating Women’s Caucuses in State Legislatures.” Cambridge, MA: Scholars Strategy Network.
https://scholars.org/contribution/creating-womens-caucuses-state-legislatures (Accessed January 10, 2022).
18. Hawaii State Legislature. 2021. “Package Report: Women’s Legislative Caucus.” Honolulu, HI: Hawaii State Legislature.

36 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

serving in elected office at the state legislative
levels and above, and in 2020, added a newdataset, women in municipal office in cities of
10,000 and above. CAWP’s scholars have conducted research on a number of topics related
to women’s political engagement, including
women candidates and campaigns, the impact
of women in office, women of color in office,women voters, and women and the political parties. CAWP’s education and outreach programs
translate research findings into action, addressing women’s underrepresentation in politicalleadership with effective, intersectional, andimaginative programs serving a variety of audiences. Programming includes the annual Readyto Run® Campaign Training for Women, theNEW Leadership® program for college women,
and Teach a Girl to Lead®, which aims to teachgirls and boys about women’s public leadership.
There are several other state-based research
institutions that conduct research and provide
data on women’s representation in their states orregions, some of which are modeled after CAWP.
Examples include the Pennsylvania Center for
Women and Politics at Chatham University,
the Carrie Chapman Catt Center at Iowa
State University, and the Center for Women’s
Leadership at Portland State University.

Leadership Development andAdvocacy
Aside from research-based organizations, there
are organizations working towards women’s
empowerment primarily through leadershipdevelopment and advocacy. Two of the largest feminist organizations in the United States,
the National Organization for Women and theAmerican Association for University Women,
have state chapters throughout the country. Bothorganizations work towards equity for women
through advocacy, education, and research,focusing on educational, political, and economic
equity as well as racial and social justice initiatives.
Some organizations work to increase thediversity of women serving in office. For

example, the Asian Pacific American Institutefor Congressional Studies (APAICS) is dedicated to ensuring the participation and successof Asian Pacific Americans in government at thenational, state, and local levels. Founded in 1994,
APAICS promotes, supports, and conducts nonpartisan education and informational activities,
research, and programs designed to effectively
enhance and increase the participation of the
Asian Pacific Islander American community inthe democratic process. APAICS runs a Women’sCollective, which highlights AAPI women currently serving, provides research and data on
AAPI women in office, and offers programming
to increase their numbers.
The mission of the National Coalition of 100
Black Women, Inc. is to advocate on behalf ofBlack women and girls and to promote leadershipdevelopment and gender equity in the areas ofhealth, education, and economic empowerment.
Their civic engagement initiatives include voter
education, registration, and rights, and increasing
the numbers of Black women candidates runningfor political office.
Hispanas Organized for Political Equality®
(HOPE) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organizationcommitted to ensuring political and economic
parity for Latinas in California through leadership, advocacy, and education to the benefit of allcommunities and the status of women. HOPE’s
strategies include a Binational Public Service
Fellowship, an executive leadership program for
Latina professionals who, “through increased
competence in national and global economic andsecurity issues, are in a position to make urgent
and long-lasting improvements in the lives of
Latinas in the United States and all communities.” They also offer leadership development
programs for college and high school Latinas, aswell as public policy conferences such as Latina
Action Day, which brings together corporate andcommunity Latina leaders and elected officials on
public policy affecting Latinas in California.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

37

Recruitment-Focused Organizations

Voter Education and OutreachAs noted, research shows that women are lesslikely to get recruited to run for office. Many
women’s PACs and political leadership organizations use recruiting as one of their tools, but Close
the Gap California (CTGCA) uses recruitment
as its main organizing principle. Founded as astatewide campaign to achieve gender balance in
the California legislature by recruiting progressive women to run, CTGCA recruits women intargeted districts and prepares those women tolaunch competitive campaigns. California is aterm-limited state, which means that organizers
know which seats in the legislature will be open
in which years. Although not all states have term
limits, CTGCA provides a model for using direct,
targeted recruitment as the primary strategy foradvancing women’s political representation. It isalso worth noting that targeted recruitment is atool that the political parties already use as partof their efforts, with varying degrees of prioritization and success. Close the Gap California showcases a way for outside organizations to impact
the process in addition to or in lieu of any formal
party efforts. According to CTGCA, their strategy
has four steps:

Several organizations work towards engaging
women as voters, civic educators, and advocatesfor democracy. The most recognized of theseorganizations is the League of Women Votersof the United States (LWV). LWV encourages
informed and active participation in government, works to increase understanding of major
public policy issues, and influences public policy
through education and advocacy. One of its primary activities is work to register voters, provide
voters with election information through voter
guides, and host candidate forums and debates.
LWV currently has more than 700 chaptersaround the country.
Black Girls Vote is a nonpartisan organization
designed to represent the concerns and interests of Black women. Its activities include voter
education, poll worker training, and a collegiate
ambassador program providing peer-to-peer
education on the electoral process.
Additional examples of women’s politicalempowerment organizations can be found here.

1. Strategic targeting of legislative districts, including
a detailed analysis of legislative districts to determine open or winnable seats
2. Prospect identification: Using allies and networks,
CTGCA builds a list of viable candidates with
progressive values, and vet the names with local
leaders
3. The “ask”: CTGCA then reaches out to prospective
candidates and asks them to consider running
4. Candidacy exploration and decision: CTGCA
works with the prospective candidates through thedecision-making process, including a structured
exploration of the district, the requirements of a
successful campaign and the legislative job itself

Appointments Projects
Some organizations offer programs that encourage
women to seek positions on government boards
and commissions. The North Carolina Institutefor Political Leadership, for example, offers a
one-day workshop, Women on Board, that helps
demystify the process of getting appointed to andserving on local, county, and state public boards
and energizes women to seek appointed positionsin their communities, in addition to improving
their confidence and networking skills.
The Center for American Women and Politics
hosts the New Jersey Bipartisan Coalition for
Women’s Appointments (BCWA), a statewide,bipartisan group of prominent women and organizations convened in years when there is an
open seat for governor. The purpose of BCWA isto ensure the placement of women in key positions throughout state government. BCWA’s goals

38 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

are to create the expectation within both major
parties that women will play significant roles ingovernment, both in the cabinet and on boards
and commissions; help the next governor identify
a strong and diverse pool of women candidates
for positions within the new administration; educate New Jersey women about the thousands ofstate, county and municipal appointed positions
available; and encourage New Jersey women to
submit their résumés for gubernatorial appointments and provide them the tools and information they need to seek appointments.
United We, a nonprofit organization in Missouri,
offers The Appointments Project®, which works
to empower women and strengthen communities
in that state by increasing the gender diversity ofcivic boards and commissions.

Civic Leadership Programs for Girlsand Young Women
According to research by CIRCLE (The Center
for Information and Research on Civic Learningand Engagement) and others, girls and young
women are committed civic actors, leading theirmale counterparts on many indicators of civic
engagement including volunteering, membership in community organizations, and voting. Yet
women continue to lag in elected officeholding,and CIRCLE identified five relevant “gaps” that
may contribute to this gender leadership gap:
• an interest gap, with young women much lessinterested in political engagement than theirmale counterparts;• a confidence gap, with women far less likely toclaim some of the personal qualities that society
values in leaders;• an expectations gap, because young womenare less likely than their male peers to havebeen encouraged to pursue public leadership,

despite the fact that women are as likely as men
to be encouraged to run for student government positions;• race and class gaps, since women of color andeconomically disadvantaged women are left far
behind their counterparts in most indications ofcivic participation; and• an assessment gap, where standardized tests that
ignore civic motivation or leadership and collaboration skills make it difficult to understand why
there is a gender leadership gap or measure progress toward closing it.19

Among the challenges of addressing this issue
are the lack of visible and accessible role models,lack of equitable access to leadership programs(especially for marginalized populations), theabsence of attention to civic education broadly
and to women’s political leadership specificallywithin the k-12 education system, and the need
for widespread programs dedicated to civic
education and to gender and civic leadership.
Fortunately, there are a handful of organizations
that provide programming related to civic education and leadership specifically for girls.
The American Legion Auxiliary, an organization of US military veterans’ spouses and family
members, offer Girls State and Boys State in all 50
states in the country. Female high school students
who have completed their junior year are competitively selected and sponsored by American
Legion Auxiliary units for Girls State, where theylearn about the political process by electing officials for all levels of state government and actively
running a mock government.
Girl Scouts of America, which was founded 120
years ago, has long emphasized civic leadershipas part of its programming, and noted in 2017that its alumnae made up the majority of womenin leadership positions in the US government at
the time, including 76 percent of women senators, 54 percent of women representatives, and

19. Kawashima-Ginsberg, Kei and Nancy Thomas. 2013. “Fact Sheet: Civic Engagement and Political Leadership among Women– a Call for Solutions.” Medford, MA: The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE.)
https://circle.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/2019-12/civic_engagement_political_leadership_women_2013.pdf (Accessed January 19, 2022).

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

four of the five women governors.20 Girl Scouts
can earn Citizen badges when they engage incivic action, including Public Policy, Behind
the Ballot, and Inside Government badges. The
badges foster civic skills for girls ages 7–18, suchas how to take part in a civil debate, make groupdecisions, and get involved in government.21 The
Girl Scout Gold Award represents the highest
achievement in Girl Scouting and also a potentially valuable entrée into public leadership.
Girls work on a two-year, seven-step process tosolve a community problem—not only in the
short term, but also for the future. An experiential program like the Girls Scouts’ Gold Award
teaches young people the power of policy andgovernment and how to advocate for change, notjust in games or simulations but in the real world
as well. For example, one Girl Scout undertook
a project related to truck safety on a local highway; her research and advocacy—and a fatal
truck accident—ultimately led the state to ban
big rigs from the highway in question.22
The Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capitol
offers a DC Congressional Aide program inwhich Girl Scouts are placed for one week incongressional offices, including those of Senators
and Representatives, during the summer in a
40-hour internship. They learn first-hand about
the nation’s political process and help membersof Congress and their staff with daily assignments
behind the scenes.
Another long-standing girls’ leadership organization, Girls, Inc., which was founded in 1864,
launched She Votes 2020 in conjunction with theanniversary of women’s suffrage in the UnitedStates. She Votes 2020 is an educational, nonpartisan initiative to support girls of all ages to gain
the skills and confidence to be future voters, candidates, and political leaders. She Votes covereda variety of topics, including a main focus on theimportance of women in politics. Girls explored39

representative democracy, the representation by
women and people of color in government, andvarious leadership qualities and female leaders.
Girls also explored suffrage and who qualifies tovote now, how to become a voter, and evaluating
candidates and confronting gender stereotypes.
Girls also participated in activities that allowed
them to put themselves in the position of a candidate, including creating a candidate speech,
analyzing and creating campaign ads, and learning to gain financial and other support throughnetworking.
The Center for American Women and Politics(CAWP) at Rutgers University offers NEW
Leadership®, a national nonpartisan program to
educate college women about politics and leadership and encourage them to become effective
leaders in the political arena. The six-day residential program educates college women about theimportant role that politics plays in their lives,
introduces them to successful women leaders,and encourages them to become more involvedin the political process. The NEW Leadership®
National Network is a partnership of colleges anduniversities across the country dedicated to developing more women leaders. Network partners
have established NEW Leadership® programs forcollege women in their state or region. There are
currently 21 NEW Leadership® partner programsaround the country.
Newer organizations have focused on girls
and public leadership more specifically. Running
Start is a nonpartisan nonprofit organizationthat trains young women to run for public office.
Running Start’s high school program provides
students the opportunity to participate in a campaign simulation, learn from high-level mentors,
and meet with members of Congress. Running
Start also offers two college programs: Elect Her,a daylong training for college women on how to
run for student government on their campus, and20.Girl Scouts of the USA. 2017. “Girl Scouts of the USA Celebrates Girls’ Legacy of Civic Engagement at 2017 Macy’s Flower
Show®.” New York, NY: Girl Scouts of the USA. https://www.girlscouts.org/en/footer/press-room/2017/girl-scouts-celebratelegacy-of-civic-engagement-macys-flower-show.html (Accessed January 20, 2022).
21. Girl Scouts of the USA. 2020. “The Citizen Badges Every Girl Scout Should Earn.” New York, NY: Girl Scouts of the USA.
https://blog.girlscouts.org/2020/06/Citizen-Badges.html (Accessed January 20, 2022).
22. O’Neil, Megan. (2009, December 24). Girl scout wins national recognition. The LA Times. https://www.latimes.com/socal/
la-canada-valley-sun/news/tn-vsl-xpm-2009-12-24-lnws-malia1224-story.html (Accessed January 20, 2022).

40 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

a Congressional Fellowship, in which students
spend a semester interning for a woman memberof Congress along with weekly trainings on how
to run for office.
IGNITE launched in 2010 to address the lackof women in elected office by building a pipelineof next generation of women political leaders.
IGNITE’s programming includes college chapters that organize activities like voter registration
drives, policy workshops, and meetings withelected women and candidates. IGNITE provides
regular virtual and in-person training to support
individual college chapters. IGNITE’s high school
programs provide age-appropriate curricula totrain girls and young women to understand how
government works, why it matters, and how toanalyze the policy issues that impact their lives.
Girls meet with elected women and candidates
from their communities who serve as role models.

Conclusion
The landscape for women’s political empowerment programs has grown in recent years, withnumerous organizations and programs dedicatedto training women to run for office. As noted
earlier, though, access can vary widely dependingon geographic location, partisan approach, ideological backgrounds, and constituencies. Ideally,
programs would be more readily available to awider swath of the population. In addition, much
more could be done to teach young people about
politics and government at earlier ages. Finally,
political party organizations, with the most directaccess to candidates and potential candidates,
could invest significantly more time in cultivating
more diverse pools of their candidates, including
by gender.

For further information on organizations belonging to each category of thesurvey, visit the CAWP “Women’s Political Power Map” at
https://cawp.rutgers.edu/programs/womens-political-power-map.

41

A Survey of Efforts to Support
Women’s Political Participation andAdvancement in Japan
Hideko Katsumata and Hifumi Tajima
Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE/JAPAN)
February 2022
This survey was compiled to facilitate discussions
at the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue
by examining existing initiatives to increase female
politicians in Japan and exploring what efforts areneeded in the future. The original report comprised
an overview report and a second section that introduced a list of various organizations and activities
in the private sector that support women’s politicalparticipation and advancement. The second section
is available online at https://www.jcie.org/2022survey-womens-political-participation-japan.
While many groups are working to address
issues faced by women, this report focuses on
those whose activities include training and educating female politicians, or that are pursuing policy
issues to promote female political participation.
It should be noted that this is intended to be asurvey rather than original research, and we havedrawn many suggestions from Women’s Political
Leadership–US Study Tour Report (Sasakawa
Peace Foundation, March 2018) by Professor
Mari Miura of Sophia University and Professor
Ki-Young Shin of Ochanomizu University. In
addition, some of the listings of organizations
and activities have been reprinted from the 2020
Directory of Women’s Organizations, with thepermission of the ICHIKAWA Fusae Center for
Women and Governance.

1. The Current Situation in JapanIn March 2021, the World Economic Forum
released its World Gender Gap Index for Japan.
Based on its scores in four categories—economy,
politics, education, and health—Japan was ranked
120th out of 156 countries (with an overall score of
0.656 on a scale of 0 to 1), and it scored particularly low in the political and economic sectors(147th and 117th, respectively). Although Japan’sscore has actually been increasing, its ranking has
been decreasing. This illustrates that Japan is lagging while other countries are accelerating theirefforts toward gender equality. According to theInter-Parliamentary Union survey on the proportion of female members of parliament worldwide,
as of October 2021, Japan had the lowest percentage of female members of a Lower House in theG7 at 9.9 percent, ranking 165th, while the average
for all 190 countries in the world was 25.5 percent.
In Japan’s 2021 Lower House election, only 186
out of 1,051 candidates (17.7 percent) were women,
which is almost the same as the election four years
prior. Of the 465 Representatives elected, 45 were
women (a decrease of two), including 10 newcomers, and their percentage dropped to 9.7 percent. The May 2018 Act on Promotion of Gender
Equality in the Political Field stipulates that the42 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

number of male and female candidates should
be as equal as possible, and there is a growing
quota movement that encourages equal numbersof men and women on various fronts. In addition, the Cabinet Office has called for more than
35 percent of candidates to be women by 2025.
However, given the recent trends in elections, itwill likely be difficult to achieve those targets.
On November 10, 2021, NHK’s Politics Magazine
summarized the House of Representatives election as one in which “the number of female Diet
members is not increasing,” and conducted a pollon the proportion of female Diet members. A
total of 42 percent of men and women surveyed
found the ratio to be “too low,” while 46 percent
answered that “the ratio is not a problem.” Looking
at the breakdown by age group, 45–56 percent ofrespondents in their 50s and above answered thatthe ratio was “too low,” while 38–56 percent said“the ratio is not a problem.” In contrast, 32–33
percent of respondents aged 18 to 40 answered“too low” while 61–63 percent answered that “theratio is not a problem.” The gender of respondents
did not seem to factor into responses.
The above results can be taken to imply thatthe younger generation does not necessarily
think that the number of female Diet members
should be increased just for the sake of changing
the ratio, but rather that there is a need for both
men and women to have a greater awareness ofpolitical participation and diversity. However,
the harsh reality is that fewer than 10 percent ofelected representatives are women. And given thatjust 4.2 percent of senior management positions
among national government officials are filled by
women, and that women comprise only 6.2 percent of executive positions at listed companies inJapan, clearly the low participation and status of
women is not limited to the political field. Thereis no doubt that increasing the number of female
Diet and local assembly members, and enhancing
women’s political participation, will continue tobe an important issue.

2. Previous Study Examining US
Models to Inform Japan’s Women’s
Political Empowerment Efforts—
Miura and Shin’s US Study Trip Report
In the United States, the 2020 elections for boththe House of Representatives and Senate resulted
in a record high of 144 women members, up
35 percent from two years prior. The ratio of
women to the 535 total members of both housesof Congress increased to 27 percent, placing it
72nd in the world. However, the United States still
ranks 6th among the G7.
Mari Miura, professor at Sophia University,and Ki-Young Shin, professor at Ochanomizu
University, conducted research on various activities that support women’s political participationin the United States, and reported their findingsin Women’s Political Leadership—US Study Trip
Report (Sasakawa Peace Foundation, March2018). In the report, Miura and Shin discussed
women’s political leadership in the United Statesand efforts to address related issues, analyzing
the factors that have prevented the ratio of congresswomen from increasing and various potential approaches to overcoming the situation, as
described in the paragraphs that follow below.
Their analysis provides insight into what lessons,if any, Japan might be able to learn.
In considering this issue, it is necessary to lookat both supply and demand—how serious thepolitical parties are about increasing the numberof female legislators, and how many women want
to become legislators—but efforts to encourage
women to run for office are particularly advancedin the United States (see the companion pieceto this report, prepared by Prof. Jean Sinzdak).
Miura and Shin pointed to several factors in the
United States that are directly applicable to Japan
as well, including (1) a single-seat constituency
system that makes it difficult for women to run
for office, (2) an election system that is not easilychanged, and (3) weak support for a quota system.
One noted difference is that in the UnitedStates, party leaders do not usually make official
endorsement decisions as they do in Japan; rather,Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

those who win the primary election receive anofficial endorsement. Anyone can run in the primary, but the first hurdle is to have women who
are willing to run, have the financial resources,
and can put together a campaign team. Various
training activities focused on women legislators
have therefore been developed to find and train
women who meet these conditions. In contrast, it
is very rare in Japan that a new candidate receives
such training before the campaign.
Generally speaking, there are two skills required
to run and win an election: (1) hard skills, including practical knowledge and skills related to campaigning and fundraising, and (2) soft skills, suchas leadership preparedness. There are also three“Cs” that are also important as necessary leadership qualities: confidence, capacity, and connections. Various initiatives have been undertaken to
help women develop these skills and qualities in
the United States. Of particular note is the roleof American universities, which have developed
systematic curricula and are providing practicalcandidate training programs.
Women are often placed in environmentsthat make it difficult for them to gain confidence. Education from an early age is necessary
for women to take on leadership roles in politics and beyond, and many US organizations
have developed programs that aim to empower
women and girls of all ages through educationand training.
In the United States, the bipartisan Women’s
Caucus was created in the 1950s, and it was in1985 that EMILY’s List was established with theclear objective of sending Democratic women toCongress. Since then, organizations to promoteand support women in politics have emerged one
after another. These organizations have clarified
what is needed to increase women’s participation in politics and are developing the necessary
programs to meet their respective objectives. As
mentioned above, universities have made great
progress in developing curricula and leading
training and outreach programs beyond the ivory
tower. It is important even in academic analysis
to change the mindset and self-confidence of43

women themselves, and these programs include
such support.
Many organizations in Japan working on women’s issues have a strong element of being volunteer groups rather than being professional organizations, making it difficult to develop programs
to meet diverse needs and to carry out ongoing,strategic initiatives. It is critical that Japanesesociety recognize the importance of promoting
such efforts and that it support the sector in termsof human resource development and financial
resources. In this respect, there is much to belearned from the US experience in addressing
this challenge.

3. The Challenges to Political
Participation as Experienced byFemale Diet Members
In 2017, JCIE brought a delegation of women’Diet members to the United States, where they
visited Congress and exchanged views with several Congresswomen, including Democratic
Congresswoman Diana DeGette, on issues facing
female legislators. Some of the key challenges
they discussed are outlined here.
1. Compared to male legislators, who have theadvantage of having an “old boy network,” it ismore difficult for women in the United States toraise funds. The Japanese female Diet members
agreed that fundraising is a big challenge, particularly for women in the opposition party. They
mentioned that, compared to their Americancounterparts, who must raise a significant amountof campaign funding to cover such expenses asadvertising through TV and other media, posters
and campaign goods, and paying temporary campaign staff, all of which is strictly limited in Japan.
The Japanese Diet members may have a bit easiertime managing the funding challenge because ofthis difference in campaign rules.
2. The difficulties of election campaigning were also
pointed out. In both countries, incumbents havean advantage, and it is challenging—especially for44 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

young female candidates—to oust incumbent malelegislators who are more experienced in terms of
campaign structure, staffing, and media relations.
3. The impact on family was also a topic of discussion. The reality is that it is difficult to balance
one’s political career and family life, sometimes
forcing women to sacrifice their family life. In
Japan, where there is a common belief that womenshould protect their families, women with families are hesitant to continue pursuing their political careers. On this point, US Congresswomenencouraged the Japanese female Diet members,
saying, “There’s no need to feel guilty,” and adding, “It’s important to have a support network
in your political career, and especially to have a
supportive husband.”4. The delegation learned about such US organizations and initiatives as EMILY’s List, Emerge, andRunning Start, which support women’s participation and training in politics. It was pointed out thatsuch support is of vital importance. The Japanese
female Diet members shared that, unfortunately,Japan still does not have a strong foundation orunderlying support frameworks for women’s political participation.
5. In Japan, there is a movement to introduce a quota
system, and while female Diet members and private sector groups are actively engaged in efforts
to achieve that goal, no such legislation has beenenacted yet. The US side believes that it is unlikelythat the system will be introduced in America,
as people may think that women were elected
because of the system rather than because of theirown merits or because of a change in consciousness or social structure.
6. The US Congresswomen shared that the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues (Women’s
Caucus) was organized more than 40 years ago,and despite differences between Democratic andRepublican party policies, members cooperate on
daily congressional activities and women’s issues.
In Japan, caucuses related to women’s issues are a
recent phenomenon, having been established onlyin the past decade.
7. One thing that the Japanese Diet members notedthat they hoped to learn about from the US sideis the role of universities and research centers on
women’s issues, which break down stereotypes
by gathering objective data on women’s roles
in politics, economics, and society. They also
provide training for female politicians based onsuch research.

In June 2019, JCIE’s Diet Women’s Study Groupdiscussed leadership challenges facing female
legislators in the international community with
Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a former German politician and president of Women Political Leaders,a network of female politicians worldwide. In
Europe, more female politicians hold top leadership positions at the national and international
levels than in other regions, and they are aiming
to increase the number of female politicians at alllevels and to focus on achieving all Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs), not just SDG-5 ongender equality.
Ms. Koch-Mehrin introduced a number of
research findings on non-legislative barriers, andpointed out that in order to eliminate stereotypes,
it is important for men to consider these issues
as well, and to build support systems throughcross-partisan and cross-national networks. The
findings included the following:
1. In terms of social structure, there is a perceptionthat women are not leaders.
2. Family approval comes first for women.
3. It is more difficult for female politicians to raise
campaign funding than for men.
4. Media attitudes about appearance have a major
impact on women.
5. The short history of women’s political participation makes it difficult for them to have informal
networks.

During that meeting, the Japanese female Diet
members expressed their sense that politicians
grounded in stereotypes make up the overwhelming majority, and that Japanese politics havedenied the voice of the minority. Politics is seen to
be a man’s job in Japan. Politicians tend to emphasize male logic and reflect the production sideof the economy, making it difficult for women’sReport of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

opinions on the consumer side to get through. A
second point they raised was that pregnancy andchildbirth among Diet members are consideredtaboo and a hindrance to political activities. In
addition, in conjunction with election systemproblems, the Diet women raised such practicalissues as the predominance of sexual harassment
by senior politicians and constituents.
These leaders were committed to the idea that
it is up to them to generate change, and it is their
mission to address women’s issues. Participantsalso expressed their view that, an environmentand social conventions where women’s abilities
are viewed negatively undermines Japan’s national
interests, and that for Japan to live and prosper
will require a paradigm shift from the current
male-oriented culture to multicultural coexistence.
The dialogues with US Congresswomen andwith a European female political leader confirmed that many of the challenges women face inpolitical participation and leadership are sharedacross national borders, and that female politicians must therefore work to bring about socialchange through international networks. Ms.
Koch-Mehrin concluded by sharing the wordsof former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet:“When one woman comes into politics, shechanges, but when many women come into politics, politics changes.”

4. Factors Hindering Women’s
Political Participation in Japan:
Sociocultural, Socioeconomic, andPolitical Barriers
In order to consider what can be done to improve
women’s political participation, it is useful to firstorganize the key factors impeding their progress into three categories: sociocultural barriers,
socioeconomic barriers, and political barriers.

1) Sociocultural Barriers
A survey by Japan’s Gender Equality Bureau
revealed the following results:

45• The largest percentage of men and women respondents (66 percent) cited deeply rooted social
norms, customs, and traditions regarding thedivision of roles between men and women as thecause of male preferential treatment in society, as
well as the delay in women’s political participation
and advancement. The percentage was especiallyhigh among those in their 30s to 50s, at more than70 percent. Additional causes given were: Japan’s
work-first and company-centered mindset, thelack of opportunities for women to demonstrate
their abilities, and the lack of childcare and nursing care systems. Similar surveys in other countries also found that social conventions were thefirst reason given, but in the United States andEurope, the lack of childcare and nursing systems
came in second.
• In addition to the above, other findings included (a)there is no system to properly evaluate women who
are demonstrating their abilities, (b) there is little
awareness of gender discrimination as a humanrights issue, and (c) taxation and social security
systems that favor full-time housewives encourage
the division of roles between men and women.

In April 2021, the nonprofit organization Plan
International released a report entitled, Women’s
Leadership in Japan 2021. One survey question
asked, “Would you want to take on a role as a
future leader?”, in response to which 18 percent of
men and 9.4 percent of women answered with aclear: “I would like to.” Those in the middle madeup 58.1 percent, and of those who responded, “I
would not like to,” 18.2 percent were men and 21.8
percent were women. Some see this as a lack ofself-confidence among women concerning theirability to lead, and others think that women do
not want to stick their necks out, but it is necessary to find out what makes women hesitate. The
report emphasizes the importance of early leadership and gender education.
Another organization, the Z-Sedai Kaigi(Generation Z Council), surveyed 2,800 people
between the ages of 16 and 35, which includes those
who are considered to be members of Generation
Z (born between 1996 and 2015) and Millennials

46 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity(born between 1980 and 1995). According to thesurvey, Generation Z has a greater sense of genderequality, but at the same time also has a greater
proportion of those with a traditional work ethos,such as wanting to work for the same company
for a long time. Rather than being ideological,
Generation Z’s sense of gender equality is a more
innate sense that there is no need to distinguishbetween men and women in daily life. Millennials
are “wait-and-see followers” in terms of values
and lifestyle. It remains to be seen what values ageneration who grew up in a completely different
social environment will use to move society when
it is their generation’s turn to take the lead.
No matter how the world is transformed,
one would hope that out of respect for humanvalues, we will see reforms to Japan’s worklife balance, gender role divisions, the current
employment system based on the premise ofmale breadwinners, and the social security system, and will change the common conventionsof a biased society.

2) Socioeconomic Barriers
It is said that Japanese women spend more thanfour times as much time as men doing unpaid
domestic work, making it more difficult for themto engage in paid work or to increase their working hours, and costing them opportunities forcareer development. Women account for only 15
percent of the total executives and managers in
the workforce, and women’s income is, on average, about half that of men.
It is said that women’s political participation
is an important factor in eliminating the gender
gap. An increase in the number of female Diet
members would likely result in an increase in
spending on welfare-related policies, the environment, and education. In addition, women inpolitics work more strongly than men to overcome the negative aspects of society, including
the gender gap. At the same time, they tend topush for reductions in defense spending andagricultural and corporate subsidies, so as aresult, there are two sides to this issue.

In an article titled, “Women’s Advancement
and Political Participation in Global Society,”in Global Business Journal (2016), Waseda
University Professor Mieko Nakabayashi
stated, “Social systems and policies will havea great impact on women’s participation. Even
if we advocate for an increase in the numberof women in leadership positions, unless wedevelop a solid foundation of female workers,
then we cannot develop a reserve pool of leaders to draw on.” She pointed out an underlying contradiction, however. “If the gender gap
can be narrowed and more women participate
in the labor market, economic growth can be
expected to follow. However, many women
will not be able to play an active role unless abalance is ensured in terms of unpaid domestic
and community labor, such as child-rearing
and long-term care, which have traditionallybeen the responsibility of women. At the sametime, while women’s political participation may
create an environment where women are more
likely to participate, if it worsens the budget
deficit then it may have a negative impact oninternational competitiveness.”
Even if there are such concerns, it is important to acknowledge that corporations and civilsociety need to create a social climate that fosters female leaders, and that a reserve army ofpotential female Diet candidates will emerge
from this.

3) Political Barriers
In addition to the numerous sociocultural andsocioeconomic factors that hinder the development of female politicians described above, it
has also been pointed out that there are further
barriers to women’s political participation in thepolitical world itself.
It has been said that the first issue of the Japaneseelection system that needs to be examined is the
Public Offices Election Act and the single-seatconstituency system. When it comes to the question of increasing female legislators, the real issue
is more one of conventional customs, such that

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

politics are largely conducted based on malecentric norms and values. The idea that “politics
is a man’s job” is an idea that is still accepted bymany male legislators and in society as a whole,and as a result, the most fundamental challenge isto dispel this idea.
In the United States, the first step in runningfor office is to win the preliminary election, but inJapan, the first step is to obtain the party’s official
endorsement. The reality is that it is difficult fornewcomers to run for office because each political party is forced to give priority to incumbents
when fielding candidates. This is especially true
structurally when a party seeks to maintain longterm control of the government.
There has been a great deal of criticism recentlyof excessive money in politics, and the need forincreased transparency in spending and decreased
money for campaigns has become a focus of people’s attention. Candidates are required to raise
about $200,000–$300,000 at a minimum to cover
the various direct expenses that will be incurred
during a 12-day campaign period. Incumbents
have their supporters clubs and a legal organization that can receive political contributions, but
for newcomers—especially, young women—who
do not have such resources, funding, and support
for election campaigns are scarce, particularly
for opposition parties. A female candidate wasreportedly told, “I will endorse you, but you haveto do everything on your own.” It is also reported
that female candidates are held to more stringent
standards when seeking endorsements.
Advocates of gender equality have requested
that each party set a target for the ratio of female
legislators and introduce a quota system. But it
is difficult to break through without the supportof persuasive top male leaders. A new wave withnew ideas and action can be the driving force
behind the changing of conservative politics, andsuch a new wave often comes from civil society
activities to support more women entering politics. It also requires a culture in which citizens are
more interested in politics.
It has been pointed out that even after being
elected, while legislators are able to exercise

47

their power in the political world, they have limited opportunities to cultivate a deeper policy
understanding. Female legislators have difficulty
accessing information and networks due to thelack of transparency of what is termed the “oldboy network,” through which policy decisions
are often made outside of the official channelsof committees and conferences. Some womenpoliticians also note that the way the legislative
schedule is organized is not very friendly tofemale legislators, and that they must engage inpolitical activities in a more masculine way thaneven male legislators in order to be recognized,
which sometimes results in sacrifices in theirhome life.

5. Activities of Japanese Organizations Supporting Women’s Political
Participation and Advancement
Part II of this survey, which is available on the
JCIE website, introduces the activities of various organizations in Japan that support women’s
political participation and advancement. In thissection, we will examine the significance of theactivities as they have developed over time.
The ICHIKAWA Fusae Center for Womenand Governance and the I-Josei Kaigi (Women’s
Council I), established in the 1960s, were postwar
pioneers in promoting women’s political participation, and with Fusae Ichikawa, a member ofthe House of Councillors, leading the way, they
worked to achieve women’s rights, including
political participation, and to improve the statusof women.
The French sociologist Alain Touraine differentiated between “feminism” and the “women’s
movement,” noting that the former was seeking
everyday rights for women’s freedom and equality, while the latter was a cultural movement
aimed at changing values by having women riseup in protest against a system that perceives andcontrols them as subordinates. In the 1970s, thewave of the US women’s liberation movement,
which gained momentum along with the global

48 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

trend, reached Japan as well, bringing new developments in the field.
In Japan, two movements emerged during thisperiod: the “feminist movement,” which sought toexpand women’s rights within the existing system,and the “Japanese liberation movement” known
as “women’s lib.” Japan’s women’s lib movement
gained momentum with its campaign to stop an
amendment to the Eugenic Protection Law thatwould have tightened restrictions on abortion,
but the proposed amendment was withdrawn
in 1974 after it failed to pass, and the women’s lib
movement came to an end.
The women’s movement in Japan was given a new
direction when the United Nations announced
the start of the UN Decade for Women (1976–1985) at the 1st UN World Conference on Women,
held in Mexico City in 1975. In the same year, theLiaison Group for Realizing the Resolution of theJapan Conference of the International Women’sYear (later called the International Women’s Year
Liaison Group) was formed with Fusae Ichikawa
as its chair.
Around that time, a new trend emerged withactivities that were different in nature than thoseof the existing women’s movements. In 1977, theJapan People’s Political Network was organized,
which was noteworthy for its concrete activities
aimed at sending women to local assemblies.
Also known as the “proxy movement,” this wasa social movement started by the Seikatsu Club
Consumers Cooperative. The club was involvedin two types of activities: workers’ collectives topromote women’s entrepreneurship, and ecological activities to “provide safe organic vegetables
for families and children.” The club was able togarner 220,000 signatures on a petition requesting that a local assembly enact an ordinance toban environmentally dangerous synthetic detergents, but when the ordinance failed to pass, theyfelt the need to participate in political decisions
themselves and started a regional network movement. They decided to send their own representative to the assembly in order to reflect their own
life and region and to build the type of community
they desired, and to achieve “homemade policies”

by ordinary housewives. They formed a network
as consumers, taxpayers, and everyday people tosend representatives to the local assemblies toparticipate in policymaking. To make this happen, fellow housewives helped the representative
candidates concentrate on campaigning by taking
on such tasks as taking the candidate’s children to
and from kindergarten during the election campaign. The aim is to expand citizen politics andchange politics and society by having ordinary
citizens run for parliament one after another andset the rule to replace each other with the next
person after two or three terms. At present, there
are 10 networks across the country, and 370 people
are serving as local assembly members. Although
it was a ground-breaking citizens’ movement, oneof the activists said that it faces a contradiction inthat they cannot use their influence as veterans in
the parliament due to the rule that they must be
replaced after two or three terms.
Around the same time, in 1979, the Matsushita
Institute of Government and Management wasestablished by Panasonic founder Konosuke
Matsushita. Based on the idea that “we must
cultivate true leaders to guide Japan and theworld to prosperity,” the school aims to help students create their own vision of an ideal society
and devote themselves to making that visiona reality. It is a political prep school in a sense,with more than 40 years of history and a welldeveloped curriculum. As of January 2022, theschool has produced 70 members of national andlocal assemblies, prefectural governors, and evenprime ministers and party leaders. It is not an
organization that targets women, and there are
only 3 women among those 70 politicians, butthere is much to be learned from the institute’s
activities and management in terms of the institutionalized training of future politicians.
In the summer of 1997, six women leadersfrom Japan visited EMILY’s List in Washington
DC. Impressed by the organization’s activities,
they returned to Japan and launched Win Win(Women in New World, International Network)in 1999 with the hope of raising seed money tosend as many women as possible into politics

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

and become a driving force for social change.
EMILY’s List—EMILY stands for “Early Money
Is Like Yeast,” which means that early financial
support works like yeast to make bread rise—is
the largest Democratic campaign support groupin the United States that identifies women running for office and provides a variety of support,
including financial assistance. Win Win, by contrast, has adopted a system to financially support
candidates who are enthusiastic about women’s
rights and improving women’s status and whoplace importance on self-determination, regardless of party affiliation, age, occupation, etc. In
Japan’s Lower House election in 2017, Win Win
recommended 23 candidates, 13 of whom won.
In addition to its activities to send legislators toparliament, the organization is holding study sessions and awareness-raising activities to promote
the introduction of a quota system for the Diet.
In 2010, the Japanese government’s Third Basic
Plan for Gender Equality endorsed the goal ofincreasing the percentage of women in leadership
positions in all fields to at least 30 percent by 2020(a goal that had been decided by the Headquarters
for the Promotion of Gender Equality in 2003),
and many women’s groups have been actively
working to achieve this goal. One of them was
the Association to Promote Gender Quotas, or
Q no Kai, which was organized mainly by Win
Win members in 2012. As of 2012, Japan’s ranking
in terms of women’s political participation was avery low 110th out of 135 countries. It was therefore with a sense of urgency that the Association
to Promote Gender Quotas and other women’sgroups began to lobby the Diet, which led to theformation in 2015 of a bipartisan parliamentarians’ association for the promotion of women’s
political participation and advancement. The
association is chaired by a male member of theHouse of Representatives, Masaharu Nakagawa,and is a joint effort by men and women in theDiet. When the Act on the Promotion of Gender
Equality in the Political Field (Equal Opportunity
Law for Candidates) was enacted in 2018, there
were cheers from those who had been promoting
the quota system and observing the deliberations.

49

While the law includes no provisions for penalties for failing to meet the targets, it was
definitely a step forward. In the 2021 House ofRepresentatives election, however, the first election since the enactment of the law, the numberof female members decreased by two seats. In
response, the Association to Promote Gender
Quotas presented policy recommendations to allpolitical parties to demand seven items, including“clearly stating gender equality as the party’s policy” and “introducing a quota system to increase
the number of female members of the Diet.”
One of the leaders of these activities was
Ryoko Akamatsu, former education ministerand a representative of Win Win. She started
the Akamatsu Seikei Juku (Akamatsu School of
Politics and Economics) as a part of Win Win’s
activities because she keenly realized the need totrain women to become politicians in earnest. At
the same time, the Academy for Gender Parity
was established in 2018 by Professor Mari Miuraof Sophia University and Professor Kiyon Shinof Ochanomizu University with the aim of realizing gender parity in politics by cultivating theleadership of young women based on academic
knowledge and by training women and minorities to participate in politics on an equal footing.
As mentioned above, both professors have conducted research and surveys, referring to various
activities in the United States, and have built abridge between academia and practice with aclear concept and philosophy, providing training
courses, training camps, use of social networking
sites, and training of trainers.
The women’s bureaus of each political party
have also been carrying out activities since 2015,
conducting seminars and courses to train female
legislators. Not only the central party headquarters but also each local party branch is conducting activities to promote women’s political participation. In this context, the regional politicalparty Tomin First no Kai opened the First Seikei
Juku (First School of Politics and Economics)
in January 2022, with Tokyo Governor Yuriko
Koike, who serves as the party’s special advisor, serving as the inaugural lecturer. In 2016,

50 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

Governor Koike launched a political school,
Kibou-no-Juku (School of Hope), which closed in2017 after six lectures. As a member of the Houseof Representatives, Seiko Noda also launched
the Gifu Women’s Political School in 2018, andthe Tokyo Women’s School from April to June
2019. It is difficult for legislators themselves tolead political schools on a regular basis, so they
only conduct them on an interim basis. In 1993,
Yoriko Madoka, a former member of the Houseof Councillors, opened the Women’s Political
School, which is now in its 26th year and is stillin operation. The political school most systematically implemented by a member of the Dietis that of Ichiro Ozawa, a member of the Houseof Representatives (former leader of the Liberal
Party), who in 2001 created the Ichiro Ozawa
Political School as a private school to “discoverand train highly motivated young people who canenvision the ideal form of the 21st century and thepath it should take, and who can be responsiblefor its realization.” The school features a two-year
curriculum, and they are currently taking applications for the 2022 class.
In recent years, there has been a new movement centered on students and young people intheir 20s and 30s who want to have various social
issues better reflected in policymaking. In August
2021, SHIBUYA109lab conducted a survey on
Generation Z’s awareness of politics. It was a
web survey of 200 men and 200 women, andalthough the sample size was small for a qualitative survey, the survey is ongoing, so trends
among Generation Z can be gleaned from thesurvey to some extent. According to the survey,
50.3 percent of respondents said that Generation
Z’s interest in politics increased due to the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic,
with the next most important concern being“consumption tax and other tax policies which
will affect daily life.” Women expressed moreinterest in LGBTQ issues, child-rearing support,
and women’s social participation. When asked
if they would vote, 45.8 percent said they would
definitely vote, while 32 percent said they would
like to vote but were not sure yet. When asked

what is wrong with politics, they offered such
responses as “the voter turnout among young
people is too low,” “politicians don’t have a good
image,” “I don’t feel that my vote makes a difference in politics,” “I don’t support any politician orpolitical party,” and “there are no policies aimed
at young people.” Although the overall voter turnout according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs
and Communications (MIC) survey was low, thevoter turnout among 18- and 19-year-olds was
43 percent, which was higher than the previous
survey in 2017. It is critical that Japan’s politics
does not disappoint the young people, on whoseshoulders rest the future of Japan.
On the other hand, it is still fresh in our memories that tens of thousands of people, mostly
young people, demonstrated in front of the Prime
Minister’s Office to protest the Cabinet decisionon July 1, 2014, that would allow Japan to exercise
the right of collective self-defense. In Part II, thispaper introduces a group of young people whohave begun to take an interest in politics for various reasons, without necessarily aiming at women’s participation in politics, and we look forward
to seeing how their actions will develop in the
future. The BBC reported at the time, “Japaneseyouth are criticized for being indifferent to politics and lethargic, but they seem to have woken
up and will not stay silent.”

6. Future Prospects
Above, we have discussed the impediments towomen’s political participation and advancement.
It has been pointed out that while the demand forfemale candidates is there, the supply is inadequate. In addition to the wide-ranging obstacles
discussed above, there are still deficiencies whenit comes to the roles of business and civil society
as places where women can demonstrate newleadership, and in terms of the educational institutions, NPOs, and other institutions as places
that train women leaders. As a result, Japan islacking a reserve army of potential female candidates who can run for the Diet. It is said that

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

women aim to become politicians—despite few
incentives to do so—because of a strong sense of
mission to correct and improve the social issues
they see around them. Of course, men also have asense of mission, but surveys have found that thistendency is more pronounced among women.
It has been 37 years since the Equal Employment
Opportunity Law was passed in 1985, and 22
years since the enactment of the Basic Act for a
Gender Equal Society in 1999. Efforts have been
made, such as the Parité movement and the introduction of quotas, and the Japanese government
ratified the UN Convention on the Eliminationof All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
Thanks to these initiatives, the environment supporting women’s participation in Japanese society, while still inadequate, has greatly improved.
But the fact that Japan’s gender gap and various
gender-related indices are the worst among theG7 countries indicates that not only the government, businesses and academia must also makegreater efforts to correct this situation.
We know from experience that simply passing
a law does not mean that the world will suddenly
change. Enacting laws to improve the problem
is the first step, but we also must change the way
in which society operates. The Cabinet Office’s“Survey on Changes in Life Awareness andBehavior as a Result of the COVID-19 Pandemic”
found that the working styles and family styles ofmen and women are changing.
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread,Japan began to adopt telework, and by June 2020,a Cabinet survey found that 34.5 percent of workers surveyed nationwide had been teleworking tosome degree. Subsequently, that percentage has
been decreasing, but given that the pandemic
has not stopped spreading, there is still a significant amount of teleworking going on, aside fromessential workers.
Currently, there are 12.4 million dual-earnerhouseholds and 5.71 million households where
there is a full-time homemaker, and when parents
with children under the age of 18 were asked how
much they felt that their housework and childcare
had increased since the start of the pandemic,

5143.9 percent of women and 38 percent of men
answered that it had increased. Although thisreflects the respondent’s “feeling” and not theiractual working time, it appears to indicate thatmen, who are said to do less one fourth the housework that women do, have also started to share
the burden a bit more. This is in part due to thefact that more than 50 percent of Japanese womenare “irregular” or part-time workers, and they
are more likely than men to be working outside
the home in frontline or essential positions that
do not lend themselves to telework, thus leaving
their teleworking male partners at home. In addition, more than 91 percent of survey respondents
said that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted
in them spending more time with their families,
and that they want to keep it that way. The reality
is that these lifestyle changes are leading to men
playing a greater role in housework and childcare.
If the sharing of housework and childcare continues to improve, it will be easier for women to participate in the workforce. They are also expected
to build a new lifestyle together with men.
As we search for a new lifestyle after the pandemic, the development of female leaders within
the business world, academia, and civil society
can lead to their participation in politics, bringing
their respective experiences to bear and serving
as a reserve corps of future potential politicians.
By doing so, it can bring about a change inJapanese society. In the business world, corporate
commitments to the SDGs have created a spacefor female leaders to play an active role, but civilsociety organizations have not grown sufficiently.
As mentioned above, civil society organizations
can play a major role in promoting women’s
political participation. But unfortunately, due todelays in various social systems and lack of social
awareness, many of these organizations do nothave a sufficient foundation on which to build
consistent, ongoing activities. It may seem to bea roundabout way, but Japan needs to create amechanism to recognize the importance of theseorganizations and provide financial support.
Politics that reflect the voices of all people,
regardless of gender or generation, will be a

52 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

major force for social reform. To this end, it ishoped that we will see the further developmentof professional and ongoing initiatives that accurately grasp the current situation in Japan andbuild systematic frameworks to resolve the challenges and respond to the various needs facing
Japanese society.

For more information on specific organizations working on women’s politicalempowerment in Japan, visit our website athttps://www.jcie.org/2022-survey-womens-political-participation-japan.

53Participants
CO-CHAIRS
Diana DEGETTE
Member, House of Representatives (D-CO)
Rep. Diana DeGette is now serving her 13th term representing Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. She isrecognized as a leading voice in the United States’ ongoing healthcare debate and as the chair of the House
Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, which is responsible for overseeing some of the most important federal agencies, including the Department of Health andHuman Services, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. In addition to chairing the Energy and Commerce Oversight panel, DeGette also serves as a member of the House
Natural Resources Committee, where she’s working to enact policies that will further protect Colorado’s
public lands and combat climate change.

Seiko NODA
Minister of State for Gender Equality; Former Minister in charge of Women’s
Empowerment; Member, House of Representatives of Japan (LDP)
Seiko Noda was appointed by Prime Minister Kishida to be the Minister of State for Gender Equality
in November 2021. She simultaneously was named to the posts of Minister in Charge of Women’s
Empowerment, Minister for Declining Birthrate, Minister in Charge of Policies Related to Children,
Minister of State for Regional Revitalization and Minister in Charge of Measures for Loneliness andIsolation. She started her political career by winning a seat in the Gifu Prefectural Assembly and, in 1993,
she was elected to the House of Representatives. She served in several posts in the Koizumi Cabinet, mostnotably as Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, and, in 2012, she became the second woman evernamed to chair the LDP’s General Council, one of the ruling party’s three most influential posts. Her areasof interest include the declining birth rate in Japan, measures for persons with disabilities, and consumer
issues.

PRESENTERS
Jen KLEIN
Co-Chair of the White House Gender Policy Council, The White House
Jennifer Klein is a Co-Chair and the Executive Director of the White House Gender Policy Council. She
was previously the Chief Strategy and Policy Officer at TIME’S UP. She has written and taught extensively
about domestic and global gender policy, including as an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University
Law Center. She worked with former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to develop No Ceilings,
an initiative to evaluate progress for women and girls since the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women and toadvance gender equality around the world. From 2009 to 2012, Ms. Klein was a Deputy and Senior Advisor
in the Office of Global Women’s Issues within the Office of the Secretary at the US Department of State.
From February 1993 through January 1999, she worked at the White House in a dual appointment as First
Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s senior domestic policy advisor and a Special Assistant to the President on
the Domestic Policy Council. She holds a BA from Brown University and a JD from Columbia University
School of Law.

54 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

Mari MIURA
Professor of Political Science, Faculty of Law, Sophia University
Mari Miura is Professor of Political Science, Faculty of Law, Sophia University. She holds a PhD from the
University of California, Berkeley. Author of Welfare Through Work: Conservative Ideas, Partisan Dynamics,
and Social Protection in Japan (Cornell University Press, 2012), Making Our Voices Heard—Revival ofRepresentative Democracy (in Japanese, Iwanami Shoten, 2015), editor of Japan’s Women Representatives(in Japanese, Asahi Shimbun Shuppansha, 2016), co-editor of Gender Quotas in Comparative Perspectives:
Understanding the Increase in Women Representatives (in Japanese, Akashi Shoten, 2014). Co-founder of
the “Academy for Gender Parity,” which provides training programs for young women to run for office. She
received the Wilma Rule Award (IPSA Award for the Best Research on Gender and Politics) in 2018 andwas decorated the Knight of the Order of Merit from the French government in 2021.

Jean SINZDAKAssociate Director at Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP),
Rutgers University
As associate director of the CAWP, Dr. Sinzdak is responsible for developing strategic initiatives and projects, as well as general administrative oversight. An experienced program director with a strong background in women’s leadership development and civic engagement initiatives, she directs CAWP’s Program
for Women Public Officials, which aims to increase the impact of women in politics and make political
women’s leadership more effective through national, regional, and local events and programs for women
officeholders, candidates, and campaign operatives. She is currently expanding the national network of
Ready to Run®, a bipartisan effort to recruit and train women to run for all levels of office. Sinzdak also
oversees CAWP’s New Jersey initiatives, including Ready to Run® New Jersey and is the project director of
Teach a Girl to Lead®, a national education and awareness campaign. Prior to joining CAWP, she served as
director of outreach and communications at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington DC.
Sinzdak received a Master of Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in English fromthe University of Scranton.

Rita COLWELL
Distinguished University Professor, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg
School of Public Health; Distinguished University Professor, University of
Maryland, College Park; former Director, US National Science Foundation;
Member, Board of Governors, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
Dr. Rita Colwell is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland at College Parkand Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and President of CosmosID, Inc. Her interests
are focused on global infectious diseases, water, and health. She has authored or co-authored 20 books
and more than 800 scientific publications. Dr. Colwell served as 11th Director of the National Science
Foundation and Co-chair of the Committee on Science, National Science and Technology Council. She
served as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Microbiology, President of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington Academy of Sciences, and American
Society for Microbiology. Dr. Colwell is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences, among many others. Dr. Colwell has been awarded 63 honorary degrees from institutions of higher education and is the recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, bestowed
by the Emperor of Japan, the 2006 National Medal of Science, awarded by the President of the UnitedStates, and the 2018 Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize of Singapore.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

55

Takako HASHIMOTO
Vice President, Chiba University of Commerce; Associate Member, Science
Council of Japan; former Chair of IEEE Women in Engineering
Takako Hashimoto graduated from the Ochanomizu University in Japan, and received a PhD in computerscience, specializing in multimedia information processing, from the Graduate School of Systems andInformation Engineering of University of Tsukuba in 2005. She worked at the software R&D center of
Ricoh Co. Ltd., in Japan. From 2009, she was involved with the Chiba University of Commerce. In 2015,
she was a visiting researcher at University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently the Vice President
and Professor of the faculty of Commerce and Economics at Chiba University of Commerce. She has
focused on data mining research and social media analysis, especially topic extraction from millions oftweets related to disasters and topical problems like COVID-19. She serves as Chair of the IEEE Japan
Council (2021-22) and on the Board of Governors of IEEE Computer Society (2021-23), and was the Past
Chair of IEEE Women in Engineering (2015-16). In 2019, she received the IEEE 2019 MGA Larry K. Wilson
Transnational Award, and Fellow of the Information Processing Society of Japan.

CO-HOSTS
Peggy BLUMENTHAL
Chair, JCIE/USA; Senior Counselor to the President, IIE
Peggy Blumenthal has been with the Institute of International Education (IIE) for over 35 years, serving as
IIE’s Chief Operating Officer from 2005 and transitioning to the role of Senior Counselor to IIE President
in 2011. Her responsibilities at IIE have included supervision of its international offices, research, and educational services. Before joining IIE, Ms. Blumenthal served as Assistant Director of Stanford University’s
Overseas Studies and as Coordinator of Graduate Services/Fellowships for the University of Hawaii’s
Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. Her earlier work focused on the development of US-China exchanges
as a staff member of the National Committee on US-China Relations and the Asia Society’s China Council.
She has written extensively on international education and academic mobility. Ms. Blumenthal holds a BA
from Harvard University in Modern Chinese History and an MA in American Studies from the Universityof Hawaii at Manoa. She is Chair of the Board of JCIE/USA.

Hideko KATSUMATA
Executive Director and COO, Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE/
Japan)
Hideko Katsumata joined JCIE in 1969. She currently manages the organization’s overall operations
and is heavily involved in numerous programmatic areas. Ms. Katsumata has been involved in citizen
movements to strengthen the nonprofit sector in Japan and served as a member of the Council for the
Reform of the Public Interest Corporations that was created to advise the Prime Minister’s Office. She hasserved on the boards of the Chubu Electric Power Company, the Japan Broadcast Corporation (NHK),
NHK Advisory Council on International Broadcasting, and the Japan NPO Center and of the Asia PacificPhilanthropy Consortium. She currently serves on the board of the Sacred Heart School Corporation andthe board of counselors of the Public Resource Foundation. She is a Screening Committee member of
the ORACLE Volunteer Activities Fund. She has authored numerous articles on civil society, including“Japanese Philanthropy: Its Origins and Impact on US-Japan Relations” in Philanthropy & Reconciliation:
Rebuilding Postwar US-Japan Relations.

Report of the 2022 US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue

56

US PARTICIPANTS
Manira Alva, Vice President, Issue Advocacy Vital Voices Global Partnership
Suzanne Basalla, President and CEO, US-Japan Council
Susan Berresford, Former President, Ford Foundation
Suzanne Bonamici, Member, House of Representatives (D-OR)
Anne Bonaparte, President, Three Degrees
Claire Chino, President & CEO, ITOCHU International
Paige Cottingham-Streater, Executive Director, Japan-US Friendship Commission; Secretary-General,
US CULCON
Wendy Cutler, Vice President, Asia Society Policy InstituteShannon Dorsey, Culture and Sports Attaché, Public Affairs Section, U.S. Embassy Tokyo
Barbara Dyer, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management
Atsuko Fish, Founder, Japan Women’s Leadership Initiative
Melissa Horwitz, Deputy Director, Japan Desk, US State Department
Isabelle Johnson, CEO, SK Impact Fund (former Chief of Staff of Sachiko Kuno)
Kazuyo Kato, Executive Director, JCIE/USA
Sarah Kemp, Global Women’s Health and ESG Policy Lead, Organon (currently, Vice President, Intel)
Rie Kijima, Inaugural Director of the Initiative for Education Policy and Innovation at the Centre for the
Study of Global Japan, University of Toronto; Co-Founder of STEAM labo (SKY Labo)
Marie Kissel, Senior Advisor for Government Affairs, Abbott
Catherine Kobayashi, NHK World News Anchor & Reporter
Helena Kolenda, Program Director for Asia, Henry Luce Foundation
Julie Makinen, Executive Editor, The Desert Sun; 2016 JCIE US-Japan Journalism Fellow
Yukiko Morishita, General Manager, Washington Office, Chubu Electric Power Co., Inc.
Elizabeth “Libbie” Prescott, Director, Fellowships Office, Policy and Global Affairs Division, National
Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)
Susan Roos, Chief Administrative Officer, Geodesic Capital
Mariko Silver, President, Henry Luce Foundation
Sheila Smith, Senior Fellow for Japan Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
Hiroko Tada, Senior Vice President & General Manager, ITOCHU International
Kathy Takayama, Senior Consultant for Professional Development and Inclusive Excellence (Acting
Executive Director), Center for Professional Development & Inclusive Excellence (C-Hub),
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST)Rachel Vogelstein, Senior Advisor, White House Gender Policy Council
Teresa Younger, President and CEO, Ms. Foundation for WomenJAPAN PARTICIPANTS
Noriko Akiyama, Senior Political Writer, Asahi Shimbun
Rie Asayama, Vice President, SMBC Operation Service Co., Ltd.; J-Win Executive Network Member
Tae Aso, Partner, KPMG Consulting Co., Ltd.; J-Win Executive Network
Mariko Eguchi, Vice President, Head of Corporate Communications and CSR Activities Office, Aflac Life
Insurance Japan Ltd.; J-Win Executive Network Member
Sachiko Habu, Editor-in-Chief, Nikkei xwoman
Takako Hashimoto, Vice President, Professor, Chiba University of Commerce; Associate Member, Science
Council of Japan; former Chair of IEEE Women in Engineering
Tomoko Hayashi, Director-General of Gender Equality Bureau, Cabinet Office

57 Moving the Needle on Gender Equity

Maiko Ichihara, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Law and the School of International and Public
Policy, Hitotsubashi University
Naoko Ishida, Managing Officer & General Manager, Accounting Department, Prince Hotels, Inc.
Takae Ito, Member, House of Councillors (Komeito)
Takae Ito, Member, House of Councillors (DPFP)
Yuko Kakazu, Astronomer and Sr. Specialist, Subaru Telescope, Education Ambassador, Okinawa Instituteof Science and Technology (OIST)
Masako Kanaya, Partner, Ernst & Young Tax Co.; J-Win Executive Network Member
Izumi Kobayashi, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Mizuho Financial Group Inc.; Member of the Boardof Directors, ANA Holdings, Inc., Mitsui & Co., Ltd., and OMRON Corporation
Mari Kogiso, CEO, SDG Impact Japan
Masako Kanno, Partner, KPMG AZSA LLC; J-Win Executive Network Member
Yukako Maekawa, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Marketing Department of Management
Service Division, NTT Learning Systems; J-Win Executive Network Member
Kana Morimura, Partner, Sharman & Sterling LLP
Rei Murakami, President, The Murakami Foundation
Yumiko Murakami, General Manager, MPower Partners
Akiko Okamoto, Member of the House of Representatives (CDP)
Tazuko Shibusawa, Member, Executive Board, Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation & MRA Foundation
Hiroko Shinjo, Executive Director, Talent Development Department, Talent Innovation HQs, Eisai Co., Ltd.
Yuko Shoriki, Senior Vice President, NEC Platforms, Ltd.
Maiko Tajima, Member, House of Councillors (Constitutional Democratic Party, CDP)
Yoko Takeda, Research Fellow, Chief Economist/ Deputy General Manager, Think Tank Unit & General
Manager, Center for Policy and the Economy, Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc.
Keiko Tashiro, Vice President, Daiwa Securities Group Inc.
Yukako Uchinaga, Board Chair, J-Win (Japan Women’s Innovative Network)
Miwa Yamaguchi, Executive Officer, e-Procurement Solutions Unit, Askul Corp; J-Win Executive Network Member
Keiko Yokoyama, President, NTT Media Supply Co., Ltd.; J-Win Executive Network Member
Saori Yoshikawa, Member of the House of Councillors (CDP)

Observers
Jack Arriaga, Senior Legislative Assistant to Rep. Suzanne Bonamici
Yoichi Mineo, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Marubeni America Corp.
Yoshie Ogawa, Advisor, Japan International Transport and Tourism Institute, USA
Arden Parker, Legislative Assistant to Rep. Diana DeGette
Daisuke Sakuraba, Consul, Consulate General of Japan in New York
Risa Shibuya, Consul, Consulate General of Japan in New York
Lisa Wong, Associate Program Officer, Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, New York
Yusuke Yashita, Policy Secretary to Hon. Maiko Tajima, Member of the House of Councillors (CDP)

Secretariat
Kim Gould Ashizawa, Senior Advisor, JCIE/USA
Hayley Hutchison, Program Officer, JCIE/USA
Stephen McHugh, Assistant Program Officer, JCIE/USA
Hifumi Tajima, Chief Program Officer, JCIE/Japan

About JCIE
Founded in 1970, the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE) is an independent, nonprofit, and nonpartisanorganization that works to strengthen US-Japan relations and build international cooperation. Operating with partnerorganizations in Tokyo and New York (JCIE/USA), JCIE sponsors a wide range of projects in collaboration with institutions around the world. These include policy research and dialogue on cutting-edge issues in international relations,leadership exchanges, and efforts to strengthen the contributions of civil society to domestic and international governance. Through these initiatives, JCIE aims to create opportunities for informed policy discussions that can contributeto a more peaceful and stable world.
In 2016, JCIE launched the Empowering Women Leaders program to provide opportunities for women leaders toparticipate in international dialogues, to build networks among women leaders, and to share lessons learned on ways
to encourage fuller participation by women in the political, economic, and social policymaking processes. Over thecourse of its five-decade history, JCIE has addressed women’s leadership in a number of studies and dialogues, and JCIE
publications that touch on this topic include the following:
Seeking the “Next Normal”—Creating a Post-Pandemic World Where Women (and Men) Can Thrive (2021)
Common Ground and Common Obstacles: US-Japan Women Leaders Dialogue (2017)
Looking for Leadership: The Dilemma of Political Leadership in Japan (2015)
A Gender Agenda: Asia-Europe Dialogue 3—Economic Empowerment for Gender Equality (2006)
A Gender Agenda: Asia-Europe Dialogue 2—Transformational Approaches to the Roles of Women and Men in
Economic Life and Political Decision-Making (2003)
A Gender Agenda: Asia-Europe Dialogue—New Visions and Perspectives for Women and Men (2001)
Japan-US Women Leaders Dialogue: Community Development and the Role of Women (Co-published with theInstitute of International Education, 1994)

www.jcie.org
www.jcie.or.jp/japan