The Wasted Asset
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501050829/story.html
Japanese women are smart and entrepreneurial, so why is so little
effort made to harness their talents?
By Hannah Beech
Posted Monday, August 22, 2005; 20:00 HKT
Yuka Tanimoto knows how to serve tea. She can do far more than that, of
course, but the 33-year-old newscaster says her Japanese male
bosses-and they were all male-weren't overly interested in her
non-tea-pouring skills. At the Yamaichi Securities firm, which Tanimoto
joined in 1997 as an in-house newscaster, she was chided for daring to
voice her opinions on news content-and for cropping her uniform skirt
from mid-calf to a scandalous length just below the knee. "The company
was looking for cute, non-ambitious girls," says Tanimoto. "We were
supposed to make copies quietly, not think." In 2000, Tanimoto moved to
the electronics giant Matsushita, but things weren't much different.
Only 2% of the women she worked with were on a career track; the rest
were so-called office ladies who rarely graduated from tea and copy
duty, even after years of service. After getting her M.B.A. in the U.S.
last year, Tanimoto couldn't face working for another Japanese company.
So in March, she took a job with CNBC as their Tokyo markets reporter.
"As a woman, I can rise much higher at a foreign company than at a
Japanese one," says Tanimoto. "The Japanese business culture is not
changing quickly enough for people like me."
Japan
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