At Japan's Carmakers, Women Managers Are Rare

In car sales and vehicle quality, Japanese automakers have long led the pack globally. Yet there’s an area where they bring up the rear: putting women in management jobs at home. At Nissan Motor, 6.7 percent of managers are women, the highest showing among Japan’s carmakers. Toyota Motor and Honda Motor each have less than 1 percent. In contrast, about 33 percent of managers at U.S. automakers General Motors, Ford Motor, and Chrysler Group are female, according to Catalyst, a New York-based group that works to expand opportunities for women. “Nissan stands out among companies in a country and industry that lag behind in female workplace participation,” says Tetsuo Kitagawa, a management professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo.

At Japanese companies with at least 5,000 employees, women made up about 2.9 percent of managers in 2011, data from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare show. Among the 780,000 people employed in the nation’s auto industry, only three are women responsible for the rollout of new models. They all work at Nissan, Japan’s No. 2 automaker, where French-Brazilian Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn has made female advancement a priority. “I’m very glad to be the poster boy of women’s empowerment,” Ghosn told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2011. “It’s not only about women but about men. I think there is a lot of wasted talent that the world cannot afford to waste.”