62 Time June 20/June 27, 2022
A SEAT AT THE
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
TABLE
Naomi Koshi is on a mission to
revitalize Japan’s economy by bringing revitalize Japan’s economy by bringing
more women into the boardroom more women into the boardroom
BY AMY GUNIABY AMY GUNIA
Naomi Koshi remembers haNdiNg ouT fly-
ers outside a train station during her second
mayoral campaign in 2016, when an older man
walked up to her and said, “You are too strong
for a woman,” and kicked her. She was shocked;
she’d already spent four years serving as Japan’s
youngest female mayor—one of just a few female
mayors in the country—and ultimately won her
second term. “I felt that sometimes people hate
strong women,” she says, reflecting on a cultural
dynamic that, by holding back half of its popula-
tion, also holds back Japan. Koshi was determined
to help change it.
Japan is one of the world’s richest, most ad-
vanced societies; it’s the third largest economy,
beating out countries with much larger popula-
tions. But its own population is shrinking, and
the nation’s economic growth has been stagnant.
Household income is down. Fumio Kishida, who
became Prime Minister in late 2021, has prom-
ised to usher in an era of “new capitalism” to
drive faster economic growth and higher wages,
but it’s not yet clear how he will address what
Koshi believes to be the linchpin of the problem:
Japanese women are woefully underrepresented
in business.
Koshi, a lawyer who now sits on the boards of
two companies, has seen this firsthand. Only 8%
of company board members are women, and they
hold less than 15% of managerial roles—one of the
lowest rates among the world’s large economies.
(In the U.S., about 30% of S&P 500 board directors
are women.) The country is ranked 120th of 156
nations in the World Economic Forum’s Global
Gender Gap Index. An April 2019 Goldman Sachs
report found that closing the gender employment
gap could lift Japan’s GDP by 10%, and if wom-
en’s working hours rose to the average of the Or-
ganisation for Economic Co-operation and Devel-
opment, the boost might be as big as 15%. Now
Japan’s main business association, the Keidanren,
has called for 30% of board members and corpo-
rate executives to be women by 2030.
“One of the reasons Japanese companies, the
Japanese economy, hasn’t been good for 30 years
is [the] decisionmaking process. They’ve been
doing the same thing for 30 years,” Koshi says.
“We need different viewpoints. Not only women,
but also young people, foreigners, LGBTQ peo-
ple. The important thing is to diversify the peo-
ple making decisions.”
So last year, with fellow lawyer Kaoru Matsu-
zawa, Koshi founded OnBoard, a company that
trains and places women in corporate board po-
sitions across Japan, with a focus on companies
that plan IPOs soon. Her first seminar drew more
than 65 attendees, and she says OnBoard has now
trained more than 230 women. But to meet the
Keidanren goal, Koshi says, Japan will need about
9,000 new female directors within the decade.
In a 2021 podcast interview, she didn’t mince
words: “I have to work very hard.”
Koshi’s work on gender equality began more
than a decade ago. After attending Harvard LawECONOMY