LinkedIn Japan’s first female country head argues that the nation needs to move toward a more skills-based labor market, and firms need to adapt to workers’ changing values if the country is going to improve its persistent gender inequality.
“Japan is at a turning point,” Wakana Tanaka said in her first media interview this week since she took over the top job in late March. “Building your skills constantly is really important in this coming age.”
It has also grappled with persistent gender inequality as men were expected to take those stable jobs while women take lower paid part-time jobs and shoulder the bulk of childcare and household tasks. Japan continues to have the largest gender pay gap among Group of Seven nations. “There’s no longer a one-size fits all policy for workplaces,” said Tanaka, who is also a mother of two. “We just did a research last month on Japanese people, and compared to 20 years ago, across the generations people value families the most important, not work. 20 years ago it used to be work.”
That focus on skill sets over lifetime employment is something the government has also been pushing. This year Japan set aside a budget of ¥1 trillion over five years for what it calls “reskilling”—encouraging employees to learn new skills to potentially switch to higher-paying jobs.
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