Part 2

Global panel: From Muddle Through to Breakthrough

 

Panelists

Katie Mather

Cargill Agricultural Supply Chain, Europe,

Middle East & Africa HR Director

Fran Maier

CEO and Founder, BabyQuip

Masako Egawa

Professor, Graduate School of Business

Administration, Hitotsubashi University

 

Moderator

Michi Kaifu
CEO Enotech Consulting

 

Kaifu: I am one of the founders of Hermes Kai, and currently working as a management consultant in

Silicon Valley.  The current reality of Hitotsubashi women is that they are still confined to a relatively

small niche professions, and I wish wider range of opportunities will open up for them. Let’s discuss

how we can realize such breakthrough, taking international guests’ experience as references.

 

We are honored to have wonderful guests today from Europe, U.S. and Japan. We have Katie Mather, Fran Maier and Masako Egawa. Egawa-san just told me that we have a pretty good representation here - U.K. at the top in terms of gender gap index. U.K. is the 15th in the world, U.S. is 49th and Japan 114th among 144 countries, so we have high, middle and low representation here. Let’s start with self-introduction of the panelists.

 

Katie: I put some pictures together, thinking that might be more interesting than words. First of all, my family, my home. Always the most important for me. In the middle, you’ll see four boys in a bath. They are my four sons. Quite a long number of years ago now. The picture immediately above that is of them today, with my husband Nigel and myself. And you might already notice that one son looks a bit different. He is Ben, 18, and he is mentally handicapped, and seriously a real gift. But that’s obviously been very important in the way that my family has developed.

 

I met my husband Nigel at Oxford University New College. It’s not “new,” it’s 13th century. And I went to the London School of Economics after that. I studied law at Oxford and then human resources at the LSE. The flags at the bottom all have something to do with me. The British flag is where I’m from, then the French flag, I lived in France for a while when I was a child, I got married in the Caribbean, the Cayman Islands, where my husband was working, I’ve lived in Switzerland for the last 17 years, I worked in Belgium, my brother has lived in the United States for the last 20 years. The next three flags are where I sponsor children, and today I’m in Japan.

 

I’ve worked mainly at multinationals. They are associated with all sorts of brands, they are working more in an industrial environment. I’ve always been at human resources, progressively. One thing that I’ve done in all of the organizations that I’ve worked with has been to sponsor women’s networks. Different women’s networks, but they’ve always had the intention of helping women achieve their potential.

 

Finally, these are what I would have told my younger self. I’m not sure I would have listened when I was 25, but I want to at least make a comment on the first one. Choose your partner in life wisely.

 

Fran: My connection here is that I went to Stanford with Michi. The first part of my career, pre-internet, were big tech companies. The next part was internet years, where I did four different startups. Then I took four years after my last startup and before my current startup, and I pursued board work, and did some things on my own, such as becoming Airbnb host which led me to start my last company, my current company, which is BabyQuip, baby gear rental marketplace.

 

It’s kind of messy, but I think the trends are “believe in trusted brands,” and I’ve been associated with those, and I had a passion for women’s products and women’s success all the way through.

 

I have two sons, and one of them works for me, and we are very close, despite the fact that I worked throughout their young lives, and I like them all.

 

I’d say that there is a big disconnect, and I think it’s here in Japan, it is in Europe, and certainly in the United States. And disconnect is that women are very effective. They are effective as board members and as entrepreneurs, but they are not given the opportunities. I’ve done five startups. I should be more successful. I should find ways to give them more money, and there are institutional issues. More money goes to men and their ventures. A part of it is there is not enough rich women who become investors until we get more women succeeding, and IPOing some of their businesses.

 

The second thing, similar, a passion about women on boards. Women only represent about 15 to 20 percent. I don’t think we should wait around, I think we need to demand more.

 

Egawa: I was born and grew up in Tokyo. When I was 17 years old I spent a year in California as a foreign exchange student under an American Field Service scholarship. I lived in a small town with a population of 5,000, which was quite different from Tokyo. And this experience really gave me an exposure to the international society and I took interest in international relations which I studied at the University of Tokyo. When I graduated in 1980, it was before the Equal Opportunity Act was enacted in Japan, and Japanese companies hired women only for assistant jobs, so I decided to work for Citibank. After four years, I decided to go to a business school in the United States and went to Harvard because I thought I needed a degree to convince my male bosses to take me seriously.

 

After getting an MBA, I stayed in New York and worked in Wall Street at Salomon Brothers for two years, and then moved back to Japan in 1988. In Tokyo, I served Japanese clients on M&A and capital raising transactions. In 1993 I moved to S.G. Warburg, a British investment bank, and stayed there until 2001. So I worked in the investment banking industry for 15 years.

 

Then my alma mater, Harvard Business School, decided to launch a research center in Japan, so I became the executive director and worked with Harvard faculty members to develop cases and conduct research on Japanese companies.

 

In 2009, my alma mater, the University of Tokyo, appointed a new president and he invited me to join his management team as executive vice president. This was a big surprise, because it is a very male-dominated university and it had no female deans in its 140-year history. I was the first female executive vice president.

 

During that time, I was involved in promoting female faculty and administrative staff members at the university. My involvement in female-related activities began in 1988, when I translated a book on American women who went to Harvard Business School, which I understand inspired “Women at Hitotsubashi” in HQ.  So I was very happy to be connected with Yuko Yamashita, who interviewed me on HQ, when I enrolled in the graduate school at Hitotsubashi.

 

Kaifu: I want to hear your experiences of how you muddled through. But Fran, you said you don’t like the world “muddle through.”

 

Fran: Sometimes we are forced to muddle through, but I much like “march through.” I’m sort of tired. At the latter part of careers at this point we are expressing some frustration that there hasn’t been change. There were times I didn’t know what my next step was going to be, but I took a step. I remember when I started match.com I had a very good job with a big company, yet the internet was happening around me in the mid-1990s and a friend of ours from business school invited me to join the startup. I sort of didn’t hesitate. And my now ex-husband was kind of upset, which is probably why he is an ex-husband.

 

But I took the step and once I took the step, I was dedicated to succeeding in that step. That has happened time and again, so I would advise marching through.

 

Katie: Whether I like it or not, I have muddled through. I had a couple of principles about my career. I wanted to be very good in whatever I did, and I wanted my career to be important, but other than that, everyday it was a bit of a muddle for me. And I think the time that I will talk about is when I was in Kodak, I was amongst the top two or three women with senior leadership role in the organization. I had the No. 1 job in HR in Europe, and I loved it, but I found I just wasn’t thinking much at all about my son in special needs. And I thought this kind of feels a big wrong. So I said to my boss, “I love this job, but at this particular time, I think I’d like to be No. 2, not No. 1.” And he said, “Are your sure?” And when I said yes, he said “How can I help you?” That was fantastic. It was a bit of a muddle. I went to the No. 2 job, and within three years the organization had been reorganized, and the No. 1 and No. 2 were at parity. So it was a time when I really didn’t know where I was going. But it worked out very well for me both from a family perspective and my career perspective.

 

Kaifu: It was very recent that Oxford went co-ed but they have caught up a lot, but it hasn’t been going on in Japan even though we went co-ed much earlier. Egawa-san, do you have any idea why and what’s wrong?

 

Egawa: This chart shows that many of the leading universities in other countries achieved 50 percent ratio for women. Yet at Hitotsubashi and the University of Tokyo, women account for only 20 or 25 percent, simply because women don’t apply. Because we have a very fair entrance examination system, women account for only 20 or 25 per cent in the applicant pool. I think this is very symbolic of the problems of our society.

 

Another problem is that even though the number of working women has increased, women are earning 26 percent less than men. And part of this can be explained by the fact that many women take part-time jobs. But I understand that the bigger reason is because women are paid less or promoted more slowly.

 

The underlying reason, I think, is the long working hours. This chart shows how many minutes per day men and women are spending on child care in different countries. You can see Japanese men spend 7 minutes for child care compared to 14 minutes in OECD countries or 18 minute in the US. But we cannot blame Japanese men because both Japanese men and women are working very long hours. We have to fix this. Many young people, as the students’ survey shows, have a very different expectations, so the society as a whole really has to change.

 

Kaifu: Let’s talk about women’s network experience. Katie, what was your motivation, what did you try to achieve and what was the result?

 

Katie: The motivation was that there were so many women who were not putting themselves forward for jobs and they seemed to lack confidence. There was no reason for them to lack confidence. So what we decided to do was to put together this network. In fact it was a virtual network. It was pan-European, so most of the meetings were at conference rooms via the net with the stated objective of helping women get more attention. It was open to men and women. The only thing you had to do was to support that objective. What I wanted to allow us to do was to put professional women, but also sometimes women who are secretaries, in positions of leadership in the network so they could practice. The chair of the network I made was actually a secretary and she was organizing events like this and introducing the chief executive officer. So that was the objective of the network.

 

It’s lovely when you can really put your finger on a direct result, and I could do that with two cases, where people did apply for jobs that they said they would not have applied for otherwise, and they got them. Other than that, the result was more of a feeling of greater confidence, something that we had been able to notice in both of the organizations where I sponsored such networks.

 

Kaifu: Fran, you invited me over to a women’s networking event at Stanford Business School and that’s how I got motivated to start this group. Why did you decide to focus on women on board? The first meeting I went was more general, women in the workplace type of discussions.

 

Fran: As I got through my career, I have seen how powerful and important boards are. And all the time it was the people at the top that set the stage, the culture, and the direction for the rest of the organization. Women need to be on these boards, because boards should represent the customers, the employees, the management and the population as a whole. And boards in the United States, in Silicon Valley, 30 percent of them don’t have any women on the boards. And this is another area, like entrepreneurship, where we have to make our presence felt and demand that we are there. And that, we did. The point with Stanford Women on Boards was the networking, the encouragement, the ability to say if somebody on the board liked to do something else and another company was looking for a board member, so to advance for the another. There has been improvement, it certainly has been good for individual results, but it’s not good enough.

 

Kaifu: In terms of the percentage of women on boards, again Europe is the highest, the U.S. catching up and Japan, of course, pretty bad.

 

Egawa: This slide shows the ratio of women on boards. Norway is at the top with 44 percent, and Japan is at the bottom with 4 percent. The reason why Japan is so behind in the gender gap index by the World Economic Forum is the very low scores for political and economic participation. They have four criteria; health, education, political and economic participation. For the first two, Japan is doing excellent or OK. But for political and economic participation, Japan’s scores are very, very low, so we really have to fix this problem.

 

As many of you know, traditionally Japanese companies had very few non-executive directors. Most of them were insiders. But the corporate governance code introduced in 2015 requires Tokyo Stock Exchange listed  companies to appoint two independent directors. And the code also stipulates that boards must embrace diversity. That’s why we are having a big increase in the number of female directors, and as you can see, even though 4 percent is very low, it is a big progress. I myself have been given the opportunity to serve on three companies’ boards.

 

I would like to propose two ideas for promoting more women on boards. First, we should use the same criteria as men and try to support each other. Many people ask me if I can think of candidates for female directors, and I would recommend some women I know who are qualified. But many companies are looking for high-profile, well-known women, those who appear on the press or TV. And this criteria is different from men. As a result, we have, for example, an Olympic gold medalist, an astronaut, or a newscaster serving on boards. I know some of them, and they are very talented women, so I’m sure they are doing great jobs. I’m not trying to criticize them. What I’m trying to point out is that people seem to be applying different criteria for women compared to men. I do know many qualified women who are not well known but can serve on boards. So we have to promote those qualified women by applying the same criteria with men.

 

Second suggestion I’d like to make is that we are starting to see some qualified women serving as executive officers or general managers of Japanese companies. They can serve other companies’ boards. We have seen the example of Ms. Teiko Kudo, who is a managing executive officer of Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, who was recently appointed as outside director of Toyota Corporation. So other women could do the same, serving other companies’ boards. We already have examples of CEOs, such as Takeshi Niinami of Suntory and Oki Matsumoto of Monex, serving other companies’ boards. We should do the same with other executives, and that way we can increase the pool of candidates.

 

Fran: I was just going to comment that in the United States, the culture has been such that some people on boards are the old boy member and then when they decided to have criteria for picking women they raised the criteria. Must be a CEO of another company and other things like that. They raised the criteria such that some of the board members would not even meet the criteria. So part of what we were trying to do was to encourage boards to look at women who have deep functional expertise in finance, cybersecurity or marketing, because that’s really the challenges the boards have to face.

 

Katie: I just want to point out one of the points that hasn’t been mentioned. I often hear that there aren’t enough qualified women. What, with the greatest respect for men, makes them think that old men on board are qualified enough to make decisions that affect the lives of women as purchasers, consumers, users. I think we just need to rethink what qualified means.

 

Kaifu: The definition of success or leadership may also have to be reframed. In the list of items suggested, one of the things that I really agree is “Don’t be shy” in taking an advantage. The situation is Japan is often whoever stands out gets knocked out. For women, it’s even worse. So a lot of women hesitate to stand out. Do you have any suggestions or strategies not to be shy?

 

Katie: When I was 25, I was very shy. What I’ve realized is that I’ve taken small, bold steps. And each time I’ve stretched myself a little, or have done something a bit unusual. And it seemed to have been OK! And that gives you confidence to do the next one. For me, it’s “step out of your comfort zone and give it a try.” Especially if you are young, you’ve got years to worry about if you did the right thing. By the time you are 40 or 50, noone would care. Just try.

 

Fran: I feel the same and I think confidence is really an important part of it, but one of the things I would like to point out is that we need to support each other, and that doesn’t mean just supporting each other in our networks. If I could like to give an example, I was at a board meeting, and the head of finance was a woman. She came in and she missed her number by 5 percent and she apologized from the very beginning, “I missed my number by 5 percent.” A guy came in, who worked under her, and he misses a number by 15 percent. But he didn’t mention it. And what did I do? After the meeting I told her, “No more ‘I’m sorry.’ Stop saying ‘I’m sorry.’” We have to coach each other.

 

Egawa: I would echo many of Katie and Fran’s comments. The advice I try to give to younger women is to be yourself. Be confident and try to establish your style of leadership, because everybody is different.

 

Another thing I tell younger people is that many women say they are uncomfortable being promoted to higher positions by an affirmative action, which many men criticize. But what I tell them is that under the current situation men are given the bigger opportunity through a virtual affirmative action. If you look at the numbers, men account for about 70 or 80 percent of the new employees when they enter companies, but by the time they become general managers they account for 94 percent. It appears like men are given more opportunity compared to their ratio in headcounts, which you could call “an affirmative action.” Because women are minorities,  they are criticized for being given opportunities through an affirmative action. This is my way of saying, “Be confident and be yourself.”

 

Kaifu: I want to discuss redefinition of success and leadership. What is the leadership that only female can do?

 

Katie: I wouldn’t say it’s only women who are doing it, but at least in Europe, the definition of leadership has changed over the last 20 years. It used to be very directive and hierarchical, and now it’s much more about engagement, motivation, communication and connection. And these are traits that are often seen to be typically female. It is interesting to me how that has certainly changed my profession, human resources, which has very largely been male-saturated, but now has the opposite challenge of being very heavily female.

 

But it hasn’t yet filtered through as much to leadership. It’s starting, but not as much. But I think those traits, which men can hold to, are actually very positive for women.

 

Fran: Leadership is getting people to follow you sometimes when they don’t want to. And to do that, you need to understand what they want to do, so it’s more of an engagement.

 

Egawa: I like the saying, “Leadership is in the eye of the follower.” You need people to follow you. In order for people to follow me, I need to listen to them.

 

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Questions and answers

 

Kaifu: Fran, even in the state of California, is there a need to set a quota for the ratio of women on board?

 

Fran: In California, they just passed a law that requires at least one female board member at public companies. And I think in a couple of years it requires at least two, and so on. As we talked about, sometimes people don’t like that idea of quotas, because then it seems like you are giving too big of a helping hand. But I think the rate of change is so slow and this law is going to give women overall who work for big companies that don’t have enough women on board a chance to say, “We want to be heard.” So I applaud it.

 

Kaifu: Katie, you seem to be managing your life very smartly. Are your children in boarding schools?

 

Katie: I’ve been asked this question quite a lot, and the first thing I say is I’m absolutely not a superwoman. I have a very good support structure, and that’s why I said earlier, “Choose your partner wisely.” I had no idea how good my husband was going to be at this when I got married, but it’s now the criteria I have for falling in love. The answer is my husband.

 

When we had children, I said to him, “By the way, we will be 50 percent responsible each for this,” and he said yes, I didn’t think he was going to say yes, and I said “Actually, can we make you 51 percent?” and he still said yes. And for the first six years of having children I had my biggest promotion when I had three children under the age of five and I was pregnant with my fourth. And we moved to another country at the same time. And we were both working full time. And I mentioned that because that was obviously challenging but doable, and now, he is the full-time father. That happened when we realized that our son was mentally handicapped, and we moved country because my job was to move to Switzerland. Now I’m not saying that is necessarily something what I advocate for everybody, but for me, I have only been able to do it because of this incredible partnership with my husband.

 

Kaifu: Egawa-san, and also to Katie and Fran, in Japan politicians and leading management don’t seem to be leading a very attractive life. Maybe that’s why young women don’t want to be in those positions. How is the situation in other countries?

 

Egawa: When I talk to my students, they say they don’t know very attractive grown-ups whom they can admire as their role models. So I think it is a fundamental problem of our society that we are not giving a dream to young people. And partly this comes from long working hours. Many men and women sacrifice their lives to work long hours in the office and do not have the real life. So we really need to work on Hatarakikata-kaikaku or ways of shortening working hours and to improve balance between work and life. And that way I hope young people can have much better dreams for the future.

 

Fran: But I’m happy to see that in the last elections in the United States we had a lot of women get elected to office. I just want to comment a little bit on long hours. Startups in Silicon Valley are known for very long hours. It’s not true. It’s the hours you could give to it because you are passionate about it and one reason why I did so many startups was because it gave me the flexibility to decide when I want to spend more time with my family and travel with them. So being self-employed, being your own boss, when you have your own startup does give you flexibility. I have no idea how many hours I work.

 

Kaifu: I agree. I’m in the same situation, and I think that is why many Hitotsubashi women do their own business.

Katie, in your company, you did mentoring and realized the company’s value as well. In Japan, it is often the case that big companies’ value does not align with mentoring to women. How did you break it through and make it happen?

 

Katie: As I said before, I work for U.S. companies and U.S. companies typically these days do want to advocate promotion of women. What I found was the problem was not senior management, but middle management. That was where the block was. If a woman was going to a networking meeting she might have been told by her manager, sometimes a female manager or sometimes male, that it’s a waste of time, you haven’t got time to do that. The way we got around that was to invite the chief executive officer or the chief financial officer to the meetings. It is quite difficult for a middle manager to say that’s a waste of time if someone senior than that manager is going to the meeting.

 

Kaifu: I wish younger colleagues will utilize us the older ones wisely, as we should be the target of criticism.  At this conference we provided free child care and 11 people took advantage of it.  We hope we can extend our reach with these new initiatives.