Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, the World’s Largest, to Reject All-Male Boards in Japanese Firms
Originally published in The Japan Times
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s biggest, will from now on vote against the nomination of all-male boards in Japanese companies, a senior fund official said Tuesday.
In a bid to promote diversity and gender equality, the fund, currently worth more than 15 trillion kroner ($1.34 trillion), already rejects nominations to boards for companies in Europe and North America that do not include at least two women.
Japan, where the business world has long been very male-dominated, had been given a grace period.
“Of the developed markets, we hadn’t started to vote against companies in Japan, because they were so far behind that we really would have hit a large number of companies,” said Carine Smith Ihenacho, head of governance and compliance at Norges Bank Investment Management.
In 2021, the fund gave Japanese companies “two years to improve,” she added.
Women in Japan have high levels of education but very few hold senior positions in the business world and politics.
According to business daily Nikkei, women hold only around 10% of board positions in Japanese companies.
“This year, we said that in (Japanese) companies that don’t even have one woman on the board, we’ll also start to vote against and we’ll make that clear before the voting season” in June, Ihenacho said.
Based on nominations made last year, more than 300 Japanese companies could be affected. In March, the fund already voted against the nomination of the chairman of the board of electronics group Canon.