Feb 25, 2021
Helsinki – A bank’s credit metrics may soon rely more on how seriously it views equality between the sexes, according to DBRS Morningstar.
The ratings firm says a clear focus on gender diversity puts lenders in a better position to live up to the environmental, social and governance goals that investors increasingly demand.
Some of the world’s biggest investors have made clear gender diversity isn’t just a fad. Norway’s $1.3 trillion sovereign wealth fund, which owns 1.5% of the world’s stocks, wants the companies it owns to have at least 30% of their board positions held by women, it said this month.
Feb 24, 2021
Not long after Japan ramped up its fight against the coronavirus last spring, Nazuna Hashimoto started suffering panic attacks. The gym in Osaka where she worked as a personal trainer suspended operations, and her friends were staying home at the recommendation of the government.
Afraid to be alone, she would call her boyfriend of just a few months and ask him to come over. Even then, she was sometimes unable to stop crying. Her depression, which had been diagnosed earlier in the year, spiraled. “The world I was living in was already small,” she said. “But I felt it become smaller.”
Feb 20, 2021
On Feb. 3, when former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, then-president of the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, explained his sexist views on how women act in meetings, he was speaking at an extraordinary meeting of the Japanese Olympic Committee Council that the media could only watch remotely, and which they were not allowed to record. Had it been a regular meeting of the JOC, they would have been banned completely. However, reporters soon had access to the minutes and conveyed Mori’s startling remarks to the world.
Mori had attended in order to provide his “private opinion” about the government’s directive to increase female participation on executive boards of sports organizations, including the council, to at least 40%. He said that increasing female membership might be counterproductive since women take too much time expressing themselves. Reportedly, some people in the room reacted with laughter.
Feb 19, 2021
After the resignation of Tokyo Olympics chief Yoshiro Mori put the spotlight back onto gender politics in Japan’s circles of power, one software developer in the country has issued an apology for the composition of its board.
“We would like to apologize for failing to make a diverse workplace by which we mean our board of directors. It’s three middle-aged men,” read the statement by Cybozu Inc., carried as a full-page advertisement in the Nikkei newspaper. “It’s truly embarrassing.”
Cybozu Inc., headed by Yoshihisa Aono, carried a full-page newspaper advertisement apologizing for having only men on its board of directors. | KYODO