Enterprising Japanese Women Network Among Themselves - Building Gender Balanced Business

• In the uphill battle that women face in running a business in Japan, networking is increasingly necessary — and often a same-sex system.

• Women need the support: A recent paper on working women found that women abandon their startups more than twice as much as men do.

• Those women who stay the course face such hazing that 4 in 5 Japanese women told a Cabinet Office survey that men are more favorably treated than women. The same survey found that 7 in 10 women leave the work force when they have children.

• But some of those women go on to start businesses, and then they need help building a network of connections, which is indispensable for business management, explains Kyoko Yokota, who has been working at forming and expanding such a network.
    
* ‘‘Female presidents have felt that there is something wrong with exchanging information with male presidents who are mostly talking about money-making ideas,’’ Yokota said

• A 2009 meeting of hundreds of female company presidents brought complaints about doing business but also led to the women reinforcing network links under Yokota’s influence.

The Kyodo News report