Japanese Women See Record Election Win, But Parity Remains Slow
Japanese Women See Record Election Win, But Parity Remains Slow
(Bloomberg) -- Women won just 10.4 percent of the seats up for grabs in Japan’s regional assembly races yet still recorded a record high, Kyodo News said, highlighting the slow pace of improvement for gender equality in the country’s government.
Results from the Sunday’s nationwide elections show that politics remains one of the most male-dominated fields in Japan -- which ranks 165 of 193 countries in terms of political representation for women, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
Candidates supported by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party performed strongly in the election, but few of them were women. Just 3.5 percent of the elected LDP-backed candidates were female, compared with 24.6 percent of those backed by the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, Kyodo said.
The percentage of women in prefectural assemblies is now roughly in line with Japan’s lower house of parliament, which also stands at just over 10 percent. The results come almost a year after the government passed a non-binding bill urging political parties to field equal numbers of men and women candidates “as far as possible.”
Big Differences
The election results, compiled Monday, varied widely by region. The Kyoto prefectural assembly is now 21.7 perfect female, while only one woman was elected to the 38-seat body in Yamanashi, near Tokyo, according to Kyodo. Several other assemblies elected only two women each, it said.
The conservative LDP has ruled Japan for all but a few years since 1955. While Abe has backed a target of putting women in 30 percent of supervisory positions in all fields by 2020, only one of his 18 cabinet ministers is female.
To contact the reporter on this story: Isabel Reynolds in Tokyo at ireynolds1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Jon Herskovitz, Karen Leigh
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