(Bloomberg) -- After becoming the Bank of Japan’s highest-ranking female bureaucrat ever, Tokiko Shimizu is now turning her focus on how to shatter more glass ceilings with a plan to tackle deep-rooted gender inequality from the bottom up.
While the common path for Japanese bureaucrats after leaving the public sector is to take up a job at a major corporation or think tank, Shimizu, 59, is launching her own consultancy after leaving the BOJ in May to focus on bringing more women into STEM-related fields starting at the high-school level.
“There are huge gaps between Japan and other countries, it’s one of the main motivations for starting my new business,” said Shimizu in her first interview since leaving the BOJ in May. “Japanese women are not less talented than men. I can help fill that gap because women have a lot of potential.”
Through her consultancy EmEco, short for Human Empowerment Ecosystem, she aims to speak to high school and college students directly to generate awareness of opportunities for females in STEM and liaise with companies to make sure those women are firmly connected into their recruitment pipelines. It officially begins work in October.
Shimizu herself worked her way through Japan’s bureaucracy after graduating with an urban engineering degree from the University of Tokyo, a rare trajectory in a country that is one of the worst-ranked for gender equality among developed countries.
Japan ranks at the bottom for women graduates entering the STEM field among OECD countries, but data from the group shows that 15-year-old Japanese females score among the highest in the world for mathematics and science. Nevertheless, gender bias is so entrenched in Japan that medical schools were even found to have been manipulating admissions against women, which came to light in 2018.
Tackling the psychological barriers women face in entering STEM fields is key, Shimizu says. “A woman who chooses to enter the STEM field in Japan probably needs to have a stronger mindset.”
After joining the central bank in 1987 — a time when women were still expected to pour tea for men and had to wear uniforms — she later managed local BOJ branches and was posted to London, until she was appointed executive director in 2020 by former Finance Minister Taro Aso.
While women have served on the bank’s policy board, Shimizu is the first to work her way up through the ranks to the senior-most level of its bureaucracy. That put her in the running for the deputy governor position last year along with another female, when the bank was due to change its leadership, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
Shimizu plans to leverage her corporate network to help women advance in STEM-related industries, thanks in part to her experience running the BOJ branch in Nagoya from 2018 to 2020 — a city synonymous with the country’s car industry as the home of Toyota Motor Corp.
In Nagoya, Shimizu said she became a close confidante to then Toyota Industries Corp. Chairman Tetsuro Toyoda with whom she shared an after-work drink regularly. She also became the first woman to be accepted as a member of the local Rotary Club, which had to change its bylaws to allow her to join, she said.
Last month, Shimizu became the first woman to be appointed to the board of Toyota Industries.
Shimizu says she thinks more Japanese companies are now feeling pressure from global stakeholders to address gender issues. “These companies have already set some targets and they are struggling to achieve, and I can support them.”
Japanese companies are facing mounting pressure from institutional investors to improve female representation in management, but progress in the public sector has been slow despite a government goal to get women to occupy 30% of leadership roles across society this decade.
At the BOJ, the top six executives reverted back to an all-male line-up after Shimizu’s departure. The bank more broadly fell from 144th to 156th this year out of 185 central banks graded on their diversity efforts, according to the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum report.
When Governor Kazuo Ueda’s term finishes in 2028 and the debate over gender diversity at the BOJ comes up again, Shimizu would undoubtedly be a strong contender for the top job, a possibility she was quick to deflect.
“If you look around global central banks, there is an increasing number of female chiefs so it could take place in Japan,” said Takahide Kiuchi, a former BOJ board member and an executive economist at Nomura Research Institute. “It’s a long way off and nothing has been decided, but Shimizu could be one of the leading candidates to be governor in the future.”
Nevertheless, Shimizu retains hope for a more equitable future at her former employer.
“Maybe in five years, we can have a female governor at the Bank of Japan,” she said.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
