Japanese financial body to hire more women grads than men

TOKYO • Japan's financial regulator is hiring more female graduates next year as career bureaucrats than male ones, in a rare move highlighting the government's efforts to improve gender parity in policy-making.

Women account for eight of the 14 fresh bureaucrats planning to join the Financial Services Agency (FSA) in April, said Mr Hiroshi Okada, head of the regulatory office's secretary division, in an interview. It will mark the first time since the FSA was created in 2000 for such female officers to outnumber their male counterparts.

Japan placed 120th in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index 2021 rankings, behind Angola and Myanmar, reflecting how women in the country tend to struggle to reach leadership posts in many sectors.

Of the national government offices that typically hire 10 or more graduates every year as bureaucrats, the foreign and justice ministries have been the only ones where female entrants outnumbered men at least once during the past decade, according to the Cabinet Secretariat.

Women comprised 4.2 per cent of Japan's highly ranked bureaucrats as at July, and 6.4 per cent of those holding director-level jobs, Cabinet Bureau of Personnel Affairs data showed.

The bureau has been calling on government ministries and agencies to pro-actively recruit women to raise those ratios to 8 per cent and 10 per cent respectively by March 2026.

The limited representation of women in leadership positions is partly due to the absence of adequate help in the past for them to balance work and family life, which has caused some officials to quit after giving birth.

Japanese government offices also used to hire even fewer female graduates.

While the FSA does not have many female managers yet, the number of women serving as deputy directors - a key post for relatively young bureaucrats that leads to senior jobs - is increasing, the agency's Mr Okada said.

BLOOMBERG