This 57-year-old influential leader, former analyst and then senior manager of the American bank Goldman Sachs in Japan, is a rarity in Japanese business circles, which are still essentially male.

The daughter of Japanese immigrants in California, she grew up on the family flower farm, which taught her "the value of work", she said in an interview with AFP in Tokyo.

At Goldman Sachs in Japan, she made a name for herself by publishing, from 1999, studies that were groundbreaking at the time on the potential benefits for the Japanese economy of an increased participation of women in the labor market and that she called "womenomics", a portmanteau merging "women" and "economy" in English.

To his great surprise, his theses were incorporated from 2012 into "Abenomics", the vast economic recovery program of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

"If you can expose the subject of gender diversity in an economically rational way, I think it's (a tool, editor's note) very powerful" estimates this businesswoman who swears only by performance indicators and quality, because "you can't manage what you don't measure".

The employment rate for women in Japan reached 71% in 2020, up from around 61% in 2012, according to data from the OECD.

A leap synonymous with economic survival for this country in rapid demographic decline and reluctant to open up more to immigration.

Many persistent inequalities

But much remains to be done.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the extent of persistent gender inequalities in Japan: "Most of the jobs held by women are part-time (...) and they are also over-represented in services, sector most weakened by the health crisis", notes Ms. Matsui.

At the end of 2020, the Japanese government also postponed by a decade its old objective of reaching a proportion of 30% of women in management positions, against less than 15% currently.

Kathy Matsui, April 25, 2022 in Tokyo Charly TRIBALLEAU AFP

Japan is thus languishing in the depths of the annual ranking on gender inequality of the World Economic Forum, in which it occupied in 2021 the 120th place out of 156 countries rated.

Japanese companies should train on their "unconscious biases" and "much more" evaluate their employees on their productivity, "because it is very difficult for women to compete with men on the time" of presence in the office, pleads Ms. Matsui.

"Often, I come across women who have not been promoted because they have just married. Their male bosses think that now they are going to have a child, they call it a + risk +. And so they take a man instead,” she laments.

Moreover, diversity at work is not just a gender issue, she recalls, also citing foreigners, sexual minorities, people with disabilities and "cognitive diversity", to bring "d 'other ideas' than those with a formatted university course.

Avoid "greenwashing"

Kathy Matsui has extended her reach by co-founding and co-leading since last year MPower Partners, a Tokyo-based venture capital fund investing in start-ups concerned with respecting environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. .

"It looks like a random combination of letters, but if you take a step back and think about the value of ESG criteria, they are really fundamental" for companies, to attract young talent and attract new consumers, more ethical than their elders, according to Ms. Matsui.

Japan started ESG investing late compared to Europe and the United States, but it is now "the country experiencing the strongest growth in this area", she believes.

Changing the mentality and behavior of large companies "is not impossible, but it just takes a long time", she explains to justify her choice to target start-ups, which they "start from scratch".

"We are not interested in companies that are just trying to tick boxes" to look pretty, she stings.

© 2022 AFP