Japan’s Upper House is No Place for a Woman

It should be no surprise that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has declared gender equality to be one of his main priorities. Japan ranks 125 out of 149 countries in measures of female political empowerment and 117 in measures of economic opportunity—a problem for both its global image and its economic prospects. In 2015, Abe set a goal of raising the proportion of women in executive positions in Japanese society from ten percent to 30 percent by 2020. The problem this call was trying to remedy was especially flagrant in Japan’s legislative body, the National Diet: at the time, women constituted only 9.5 percent of its 465 …