Women could be solution to Japan tech worker shortage
TOKYO — If Anna Matsumoto had listened to her teachers, she would have kept her inquisitive mind to herself — asking questions, they told her, interrupted class. And when, at age 15, she had to choose a course of study in her Japanese high school, she would have avoided science, a track that her male teachers said was difficult for girls.
Instead, Matsumoto plans to become an engineer. Japan could use a lot more young women like her.
Despite its tech-savvy image and economic heft, the country is a digital laggard, with a traditional paperbound office culture where fax machines and personal seals known as hanko remain common. The pandemic has reinforced the urgent need to modernize, accelerating a digital transformation effort promoted by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, including the opening Wednesday of a new Digital Agency intended to improve the government’s notoriously balky online services.
To narrow the gap, Japan must address a severe shortage of technology workers and engineering students, a deficit made worse by the near absence of women. In the university programs that produce workers in these fields, Japan has some of the lowest percentages of women in the developed world, according to UNESCO data. It also has among the smallest shares of women doing research in science and technology.
Improving the situation will depend in part on whether Japanese society can be nudged away from the mindset that tech is a strictly male domain. It’s an attitude reinforced in comic books and TV shows and perpetuated in some households, where parents
worry that daughters who become scientists or engineers will not get married.
As Matsumoto sees it, keeping women out of technology is wasteful and illogical. “Half the world’s population is women,” said Matsumoto, 18, who will attend Stanford University this fall and intends to study human-computer interaction. “If only men are changing the world, that’s so inefficient.”
With its shrinking, graying population and declining workforce, Japan has little room to squander any of its talent.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry projects a shortfall of 450,000 information technology professionals in Japan by 2030. It has likened the situation to a “digital cliff ” looming before the world’s third-largest economy.
In the World Digital Competitiveness Ranking compiled by the International Institute for Management Development, Japan ranks 27th globally and seventh in Asia, behind countries like Singapore, China and South Korea.
Japan’s new digital push could offer an opportunity to elevate its women. But it could also leave them further behind.
Globally, women stand
to lose more than men as automation takes over low-skilled jobs, according to the 2021 UNESCO Science Report, released in June. Women also have fewer opportunities to gain skills in the increasingly high-demand fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data engineering, the report said.
To help prepare young people for the digital future, the Japanese government last year made computer programming classes mandatory in elementary schools.
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. Women make up 14% of university graduates in Japanese engineering programs and 25.8% in the natural sciences, according to UNESCO data.