"If I walk into a room with a male junior colleague, the customer will assume he’s the managing director and I am the secretary. This happens regularly."-
Ameera Shah, managing director and chief executive of Metropolis Healthcare Ltd.
Read Women at Work: Metropolis Healthcare’s CEO at The Wall Street Journal
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Japan ranked 101 out of 135 countries on the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Gender Gap Report. The list considered data from labor-force participation, education, sex ratio, life expectancy, and political empowerment.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has put gender equality on the top of his priority list in order to promote healthy economic growth. He considers putting women in 30 percent of leadership positions by 2020 a goal.
According to the Global Gender Gap Report, closing the gender gap in employment in Japan would increase GDP by as much as 16 percent.
According to Sheryl Sandberg, quotas are not the only solution to fixing Japan’s professional gender imbalance. “Even with quotas, if we don’t address some of the fundamental, underlying issues of gender, it won’t be enough,” said Sandberg.
Read Would Affirmative Action Help Women in Japan? on The Wall Street Journal