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Miss International Pageant |
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A group of conservatively dressed businesswomen chatted in a Tokyo hotel lobby recently, awaiting the start of a conference planned to raise the profile of women in Corporate Japan.
Things took a surreal turn as a parade of tall, scantily clad beauty queens suddenly made their way past toward their own gathering: the Miss International pageant.
The Prince Hotel's planners seemed to miss the irony of placing the two events -- one celebrating women's brains, the other their sex appeal -- side by side.
It was an apt metaphor for what many women experience in this nation of 127 million.
The desire to be taken as seriously collides with those in the executive suite who still see women as ornaments to a business culture ruled by men in gray suits.
Kuniko Inoguchi is one of those rolling up her sleeves to change things and remove one of the most-enduring obstacles to faster growth: The failure to fully use half of Japan's labor force.
``Japan may be the world's second-biggest economy, but it ranks 42nd in the world when it comes to women's participation in political and economic life,'' Inoguchi said at the Oct. 2 Symposium on Women in Financial Services sponsored by the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan. ``That has to change and the good news is I think we're about to see that.'' /Bloomberg.com
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Miss International