• Kumiko NEMOTO Professor of Management in the School of Business Administration, Senshu University

• Kenneth Mori McElwain Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo.

As many Japanese companies engage in corporate governance reforms to globalize their business management, some researchers debate whether Japanese companies are shifting their management toward the US corporate management model, which is based on strong shareholder presence and market efficiency with high CEO compensation and weak labor security. These corporate reforms, which include a large increase in foreign shareholders, also correspond with an increase in female board members. The number of female board members in Japanese companies has quadrupled over the last decade. Does this mean that Japanese companies are emulating Western corporate efforts to rigorously incorporate female top executives in their businesses? In this presentation, I examine how pressure from the Japanese government and foreign institutional investors plays a large role in increasing the number of female outside board members in many Japanese companies and how such changes in board diversity may help to remedy gender inequality in Japan.

Kumiko Nemoto is a professor of management in the School of Business Administration at Senshu University in Tokyo, Japan. Her research focuses on gender, work, organizations, and institutional conditions. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Too Few Women at the Top: The Persistence of Inequality in Japan (Cornell University Press, 2016).