The gender gap is significantly greater in Japan than in any other
advanced OECD countries. A country’s competitiveness depends on its human
talent—the skills, education and productivity of its workforce. This research
is unique because it presents empirical evidence testing whether increasing
gender diversity is associated with improved firm performance for Japanese
listed companies, which have different cultural backgrounds from Western
companies, after controlling for size and firm age. A number of researchers
have proposed various mechanisms that would imply a positive relationship
between workforce diversity and firm performance. As Worthley et al. [1] point
out, the growing importance of the Japanese female workforce under global
competition requires a better understanding of gender-related issues in
organizational management which is undergoing a transformation from their
rooted traditional managerial habits, such as seniority-based promotion,
lifetime employment, paternalism, or prioritizing corporate harmony, which
favor men. We find statistically significant positive relationships between
managerial gender diversity and one measure of firm performance, Tobin’s q,
without a long time lag required for it to be realized. We find, similarly to
Siegel and Kodama [2], that manufacturing firms benefit significantly and
sensitively to a greater extent from increasing managerial gender diversity as
compared to those in the service industries, and moreover the curvature of this
relationship is significantly greater for manufacturers. Furthermore, firms
that demand fewer hours of overtime from their employees also experience this
performance boost with increases in management gender diversity, with the same
concave shape, and the more OT is reduced the more pronounced the effect.
Having established a committee for diversity promotion by 2006 did not show any
impact on firm performance per se, even by 2012, but it did magnify the effect
of gender diversity on Tobin’s q, providing support for Pless and Maak’s [3] conjecture
that a culture of inclusiveness is required for the benefits accruing from
gender diversity to truly be realized. Finally, it is concluded that gender
diversity could revitalize Japanese firms by providing an immediately
accessible but underutilized source of competitive advantage.
Author(s) Details
Yukiko Nakagawa
Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan.
Please see the book here:- https://doi.org/10.9734/bpi/cpassr/v3/1463
