The incident highlights ongoing struggles with gender parity in Japan—which ranks lowest among G7 member states on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index.

The incident highlights ongoing struggles with gender parity in Japan—which ranks lowest among G7 member states on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index.

  • FiskFisk33@kbin.social
    27·
    1 year ago

    When asked how he felt being the only male representative, Ogura, a Cabinet minister, said that male leaders with strong enthusiasm for gender equality are still needed,

    this is true though

    • livus@kbin.social
      14·
      1 year ago

      They are needed in society, sure, but is he saying these men are needed to lead women in matters of gender equality?

      Because that’s the thing about this that’s raising eyebrows.

        • livus@kbin.social
          3·
          1 year ago

          My point is, if he’s not meaning that, then he’s not addressing the issue of him doing that.

          And if he does mean that then yikes.

      • AshDene@kbin.social
        5·
        1 year ago

        I mean, if genders are equal then an equal number of men and women should be leading in matters of gender equality.

        And there are real issues that stem from this. If you make it so that under-represented people always lead initiatives to improve representation, you are adding workload to the under-represented people involved in the <activity> (governance in this case), and making them even more under-represented in the rest of the activity.

        The optics in this case are bad enough that the downsides of sending a candidate chosen in a gender-neutral fashion outweigh the upsides, but I’d definitely advise being cautious about assuming that’s always the case. If anything it’s the exception, not the rule.

          • AshDene@kbin.social
            2·
            1 year ago

            And where do you think a woman has more power? In a meeting on women’s empowerment, or a meeting on… I don’t know… how many weapons to give to Ukraine?

            If you pull women away from the latter to send them to the former that is negatively impacting women’s empowerment.

            Like I said, the optics in this case make it worth it anyways, but it is not a clear cut rule where that is always the case, and it’s easy to do it too often.

            • ChemicalRascal@kbin.social
              1·
              1 year ago

              There’s enough women out there that sending one as a delegate to a women’s empowerment conference is not going to require pulling one out of a meeting about Ukraine armaments.

              There’s actually a lot of women around. So, so many. It’s actually a little intimidating just how many women there are.

            • livus@kbin.social
              1·
              1 year ago

              I’m struggling to understand why you think these specific women (and man) who are leaders on social empowerment are also going to be military logistics experts who are being pulled away from that field.

        • osarusan@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          It’s a shame that you’re getting downvoted for this. You make an excellent point.

          This is literally the only news article I have seen about The G7 Ministerial Meeting on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, and guess what? It’s about a man being there. There’s very little about what the meeting actually accomplished.

          The optics are bad, for sure, but would Time have even written a piece about this meeting if the scandal of a man being involved wasn’t there? Is this anything more than countries just making a token display by shunting some women off to Nikko for a photo op? Why is the name of the man involved mentioned in the article, but not one of the women’s names is mentioned?

          The entire piece seems set up like a fluff piece so that people can scoff at Japan for being such shit about gender equality, while feeling good about themselves, patting themselves on the back, and saying “Mission accomplished!” Even the media is playing along. Haha, Japan bad, other countries good, here’s an article about a man!

  • geoffervescent@kbin.social
    5·
    1 year ago

    If this was a meeting on gender equality rather than female empowerment your reaction would make more sense. The two concepts are similar but different and apply to different social contexts.

    Equality is a political goal, empowerment is the actions we collectively take today regardless of our patchwork of political realities. Do we need men to be the leaders of female empowerment in places where women do not yet feel even close to equal to men? Maybe this would make sense in some places, counties where women leaders are ubiquitous like New Zealand and Finland (they arent really ubuquitous , merely moreso than the rest of the world). But that’s really up to the women to decide who empowers them when they feel disenfranchised by their country’s establishment.

    So do you think Japanese women feel inspired and empowered by this guy? Or is it better interpretiert as tonedeaf homework put forth by someone who didnt understand the assignment?

  • Halafax@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    The “World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index” is pretty batshit insane. Areas were women have an advantage don’t count, so it’s just a manipulated answer to a loaded question.