Japan Needs a Lot More Tech Workers. Can It Find a Place for Women?

Ms. Ito, who is general manager at Astroscale, a company that seeks to remove space debris circling the Earth, said she had not encountered gender discrimination either in school or in her work. But she said she did see an entrenched bias in Japanese society, including a belief that women “aren’t very logical or mathematical.”

She blames images in popular culture. “Boys use robots to fight the bad guys, but girls use magic,” she said. “I’ve wondered why we don’t see the opposite very much.”

Ms. Ito predicted mixed fortunes for Japanese women as the country digitizes. While those in their 40s and older may be left behind, younger women will benefit from the new opportunities, she said.

“The youth of today will narrow the digital gender gap, but it will take time,” she said.

To help prepare young people for the digital future, the Japanese government last year made computer programming classes mandatory in elementary schools.

Haruka Fujiwara, a teacher in Tsukuba, just north of Tokyo, who has been teaching and coordinating programming classes, said she had seen no difference in enthusiasm or ability between girls and boys.

By age 15, Japanese girls and boys perform equally well in math and science on international standardized tests. But at this critical point, when students must choose between the science and humanities tracks in high school, girls’ interest and confidence in math and science suddenly wane, surveys and data show.

This is the beginning of Japan’s “leaky pipe” in technology and science — the higher the educational level, the fewer the women, a phenomenon that exists in many countries. But in Japan’s case, it narrows to a trickle, leaving a dearth of women in the graduate schools that produce the country’s top science talent.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/business/japan-tech-workers-women.html