Woman director shakes up Japanese bank, others lag

By Isabel Reynolds

TOKYO, Nov 13 (Reuters Life!) - Michiko Achilles blasted through the "iron ceiling" that blocks many Japanese women's careers when she became a director at a bank this year, but an international survey shows her compatriots are falling behind.

She is among a handful of women breaking new ground. In September, Yuriko Koike became the first woman to stand for the leadership of the main ruling party and this week Naoko Yamazaki was picked as the second Japanese woman to go into space.

But a survey released this week by the World Economic Forum, a Swiss think tank known for its annual leadership summit in Davos, ranked Japan 98th of 130 countries in terms of gender discrimination, by far the lowest among the major industrialised countries. [ID:nLC454529]

Japan's ranking has fallen from 91st place last year and 80th spot in 2006.

After a career spent mostly with Western corporations, Achilles, a 52-year-old mother of two, chose the conservative Aozora Bank precisely because it seemed like a tough challenge.

"Many people told me Japanese companies are where the work really needs to be done," she told Reuters. "A lot of them are just faithfully following the old Japanese ways of doing things."

She said her arrival has been an eye-opener for staff at Aozora Bank (8304.T).

"It's a new experience for the male employees. I think they are confused as to how to deal with me, at least at first."

"I say what I think. In Japanese male society, people tend to try to work out what other people are thinking before they speak."

ATTITUDES NEED TO CHANGE

Achilles, married to an American, says a dearth of female role models and managers' lack of skills have hampered efforts to overcome Japan's workplace gender gap.

She has found that mentoring programmes help change male Japanese executives' attitudes towards female staff.

"Directors were amazed to find out how different female employees were from what they had imagined," Achilles told a recent symposium on diversity in Tokyo. "In fact, they would often be so impressed that they would want to transfer the person to their own team."

Progress is slow on a government initiative to have women occupy 20 percent of managerial jobs by 2020.

"It's about attitudes," said a spokesman for the Japanese government's Gender Equality Bureau.