Women in Asia are slowly starting to break through historic barriers to the top of the corporate world

But if Tottori’s ascent is a breakthrough for Japanese women, in another sense, its novelty highlights the extraordinary durability of Japan’s glass ceiling. Of the 1,836 companies listed on the top-tier “prime” section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, only 15 were led by women, or less than 1%, according to a January 2023 report by credit research firm Teikoku Databank. On Japanese boards, women occupy 13% of the seats at the exchange’s prime market companies, compared with 32% and 33% respectively for firms listed on the U.S.’s Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange, and 40% at companies trading on European exchanges.

Women are underrepresented in boardrooms the world over. Of the firms ranked on this year’s Fortune Global 500, just 28 are run by women. But the gender gap yawns especially wide in Asia, where only four Global 500 companies—Chinese online retailer JD.com, Indonesian oil and gas giant Pertamina, Korea Gas, and Chinese electronics components manufacturer Luxshare Precision Industry—have women CEOs.

Make no mistake: Asia has an abundance of talented female business leaders. Fortune’s new Most Powerful Women Asia list recognizes 100 of them, chosen from a roster of executives and entrepreneurs that gets deeper every year.

And yet Asian firms lag Western counterparts by almost every meaningful measure of gender equality, including workforce participation, seniority, pay, and board representation. In China and India, the region’s two largest economies, the percentage of women in the workforce has declined steadily since the 1990s. South Korea and Japan have among the highest gender pay gaps of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations. And while Malaysia leads the region in gender equality on corporate boards, with women accounting for 28.5% of directors and matching the global average, in Asia’s other major economies the percentage of women directors remains below 20%, according to a 2023 survey by Deloitte.

The region’s government and business leaders are moving, slowly, to create more opportunities for women. Japan has succeeded in dramatically boosting the number of women in the workforce. Stock markets in Asia’s three largest financial hubs—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo—have set explicit targets for boosting the share of female directors. And the patriarchs of Asia’s largest family-owned businesses seem increasingly willing to pass the reins to daughters, not just sons.

Tan Su Shan, who next March will become the first female CEO of DBS Group, a Singapore-based bank that is Southeast Asia’s largest lender, sees cause for optimism now that past prejudices about women in business are finally fading. “It’s a great time to be a woman leader in Asia,” she declares.

But the picture is complex, and prospects for women leaders vary greatly from economy to economy. Consider China, which faces the challenges of an aging, shrinking workforce, and has every reason to encourage more women to work and join the executive ranks. Equality of the sexes is enshrined in China’s constitution, and an oft-cited revolutionary slogan holds that “women hold up half the sky.” But current Chinese leadership has emphasized a return to traditional roles for women. At an October meeting of the All-China Women’s Federation, Chinese president Xi Jinping exhorted delegates to “actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture.” A recent report by Bain & Co. in collaboration with executive search firm Spencer Stuart found that, although Chinese men and women begin their careers “on similar starting lines” based on education and workforce participation, “only a small percentage of women in China reach the executive ranks … and very few become CEOs.” The report found that women hold only about 19% of executive seats in China. A majority of women surveyed by authors of the report said their families didn’t understand their career ambitions, while their employers failed to support them in managing family duties.

In Hong Kong, Bonnie Chan, the first woman CEO of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), which runs the financial hub’s bourse, is leading a high-profile campaign to persuade the 2,600 companies traded on the exchange to forswear single-gender boards. In 2022, the exchange’s listing committee, which Chan then headed, announced that all companies on the exchange would be required to include both men and women on their boards by the end of 2024. The push seems to be getting traction: Chan says that as of August, the number of listed companies with single-gender boards has fallen to fewer than 350, down from 800 two years ago, and despite the long odds, she says she has a “high level of confidence” that all firms will comply with the new rule by year-end.

HKEX hasn’t announced penalties for companies that miss the deadline, but Chan warns there will be consequences. Failure to heed the single-gender-board ban, she says, will be treated “no differently than a breach of compliance for other mandatory rules. A letter will be sent to the company asking for an explanation. The listing committee will decide on actions to be taken.”

A showdown could be tricky. Among the holdouts are China’s state-owned companies, whose directors are typically appointed by the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, a Beijing oversight body. But data published by David Webb, an activist investor based in Hong Kong, suggests that the largest Hong Kong–listed Chinese SOEs (state-owned enterprises) have recently added women directors.

Roughly 19% of the directors of Hong Kong–listed companies are women. The Hong Kong Exchange hasn’t set a mandatory quota for the share of women directors on the boards of listed firms; Chan doesn’t think that will be necessary. “I hope everyone will appreciate that this genuinely adds value,” she says.

One risk is “overboarding,” where the same women sit on multiple boards, which improves numbers but doesn’t increase real diversity. Among Tokyo-listed firms, 30% of women directors sit on more than one board, double the share of men, according to Reuters.

Singapore, too, eschews formal quotas in favor of voluntary targets. The Council for Board Diversity (CBD), an advisory body established by the city-state’s Ministry of Social and Family Development, has set a goal of boosting the percentage of female directors at Singapore’s 100 largest companies beyond 30% by 2030, up from 23.7% in 2023. Singapore fares less favorably in board diversity if the lens is widened to include all 700 companies on the Singapore Stock Exchange. At those companies, only 16% of directors are women, and 38% had all-male boards, according to the CBD. Notably, though, Singapore’s Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp., which with revenues of $18 billion is Southeast Asia’s third-largest lender, is led by Helen Wong (No. 2 on this year’s MPW Asia list).

Tan argues that women in Singapore begin their careers with many advantages over men. Among younger workers, more women than men have college degrees, and men are required to perform two years of military service. But often the tables are turned after women give birth, with women expected to remain home and raise children. In August, Singapore announced that it would increase government-paid parental leave to 30 weeks by 2026, up from 20 weeks currently. The government also moved last year to legalize egg freezing, a measure Tan, a former member of parliament, has advocated for more than a decade.

No Asian economy has grappled with gender equality more arduously than Japan, a nation vexed by the world’s oldest workforce, among the world’s lowest birth rates, and a long-standing aversion to immigrant labor. Japan’s overwhelmingly male government and business leaders know women must have a greater role in the workplace if Japan’s economy is to survive, much less thrive. But the Japanese experience underscores how challenging it can be for companies to correct gender imbalances even when there is broad consensus that doing so is an existential imperative, not just a matter of social justice.

“In Japan today, the feeling is that everyone understands the ‘why’” for creating more opportunities for women in the workplace, says Tokyo-based venture investor Kathy Matsui. “But everyone still struggles with the ‘how.’”

Matsui, formerly vice chair of Goldman Sachs Japan, has been explaining the “why” since 1999 when she coauthored a research report that coined the term “womenomics.” Japan’s once-booming economy had languished for a decade in the wake of a stock and property collapse. Matsui, a Japanese American educated at Harvard, argued that Japan’s best hope for revival was increasing the labor supply by getting more women to work and making it easier for them to balance the responsibilities of work and raising children. Japan, she calculated, could boost GDP growth to 2.5% from 2.3% by increasing Japan’s female labor participation ratio to 59%, the U.S. level, up from the country’s then-prevailing rate of 50%.

To achieve that goal, Matsui advised, Japan’s government would need to introduce a raft of new policies to improve parental-leave benefits, expand access to day care, and mandate equal pay for equal work. Businesses would have to become more family-friendly and promote more women to management roles.

Japan overshot Matsui’s target—by a mile. Policy-makers and firms gradually embraced the logic of increasing the role of women in the labor market. Then in 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cited Matsui in explicitly endorsing “womenomics” as a key component of his economic policy platform. In the years since, Japanese authorities have dramatically expanded subsidies and tax breaks for families with children and increased the number of childcare centers. Japanese parents are now entitled to take 180 days of parental leave at two-thirds of monthly pay.

Millions of Japanese women went to work. For women in prime working years, those between the ages of 25 and 54, Japan’s female labor participation rate has surged to a record high of 83%, compared with 77% for the U.S. Japan’s workforce is growing now even as its population continues to shrink.

But by other metrics, Japan remains a laggard on gender equality. More than half of women in Japan’s workforce hold part-time jobs, according to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare—and even those with full-time positions hold more junior roles and earn significantly less than their male counterparts. Women in Japan earn 22% less than men, according to the OECD, the widest pay gap among any of the Group of Seven economies. In its 2024 Global Gender Gap report, the World Economic Forum ranked Japan 118 out of 146 countries.

And while more women are working, there has been no comparable increase in the number of women in Japanese boardrooms. In June of last year, the Japanese government set a target for women to make up at least 30% of prime-market listed company boards by 2030. More recently the government moved to require businesses with more than 300 workers, both listed and unlisted, to disclose the share of women they employ in management positions on a regular basis. Investors, too, are turning up the pressure. Foreign funds including Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Norway’s giant sovereign wealth fund have declared they will vote against board nominations of Japanese companies without women directors. Japan’s Nomura Asset Management has vowed to do likewise.

Courtesy of HKEX

Critics of such tactics complain firms should be free to hire leaders on merit and experience without regard to gender. But Tottori’s appointment suggests Japan has plenty of talented women leaders who have been overlooked. In 1985, when she joined the aviation industry, women weren’t considered for executive roles at big companies like JAL, which was founded in 1951 as a state-owned carrier before becoming independent in 1987. When the company went bankrupt in 2010, the government recruited a maverick, Kyocera founder Kazuo Inamori, to turn things around. Inamori—who lamented in a 2012 BBC interview that the company had lost touch with customers—led a transformation of JAL’s corporate culture and aggressively promoted frontline operators over bureaucrats. Tottori was chief customer officer before she was promoted to the top job.

If Tottori represents a new style of Japanese female executive, one who arrived in the C-suite through an unconventional path, Makiko Ono might be the premier example of a woman rising through dogged determination.

Perhaps Japan’s most high-profile woman business leader, Ono is CEO of Suntory Beverage and Food, the nonalcoholic division of drinks giant Suntory Holdings. With $11 billion in revenue, accounting for 54% of group sales, SB&F is the largest listed Japanese company with a female CEO. Ono joined the mergers and acquisitions team of Suntory in 1982 after studying Portuguese at Tokyo University. One of her first projects was the firm’s successful bid for the Château Lagrange winery in Bordeaux. Later, when Ono asked to be transferred to France to learn more about the wine business and look for other investment opportunities for the group, the HR department turned her down. In its 80-year history, the company had never posted a female employee outside Japan.

But Ono waited for the world to turn. In 1991, she was transferred to Suntory France to focus on the company’s wine business, becoming the company’s first female expat. She helped Suntory forge partnerships with Britain’s Lucozade and Ribena, and later with French soda maker Orangina. In 1997, Ono returned to Tokyo to become the marketing director for Häagen-Dazs Japan, in which Suntory has a 40% stake. After a stint as Suntory Holdings chief sustainability officer, Ono was chosen as SB&F CEO in 2023.

Ono is single and has told Japanese media that she might not have risen to leadership if she had married and had children. But she boasts that now 100% of SB&F female employees who give birth return to work.

That’s a positive example for firms throughout the region. The challenge now, for Suntory and other Asian companies, is to ensure that once those women return to work, they have an equal chance to lead.

This article appears in the October/November 2024 issue of Fortune with the headline “A slow ascent to the top.”