Baseball: One Way in Which Japan Leads in Gender Diversity? - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Japan ranks toward the bottom among richer nations in terms of gender diversity in business and most other aspects of life. In a world where women routinely outnumber men in universities in both rich and poor countries, about a quarter of Japanese undergraduates at leading schools are women.

• But a professional baseball team is making waves with its hire of a teen as the first professional baseball player who is female.

• Eri Yoshida is joining the Kansai Independent League’s Kobe 9 Cruise team as a knuckleball pitcher, a form of throwing that involves more finesse than strength but still will have her facing some of the best and most powerful batters in the world.

• Machiko Osawa, an economist at Japan Women’s University who specializes in women’s roles in Japanese workplaces, told the Christian Science Monitor of Yoshida: “She is a symbol of the changing status of women in Japan. She’s been accepted in sports, a very conservative world.”

• How much her ascension means, though, is open to question. Japanese baseball is reeling from competition from other sports and poaching of talent by US teams, so even a Kobe 9 official acknowledged that media attention over Yoshida was welcome.

• But there might be something else to this as well: The Kobe 9 Cruise is the only Japanese pro baseball team owned by a woman. And Yoshida says she fantasizes about being a player not on in the Kansai league but in an all-women’s league. A (modern) league of their own (in Japan)?

The Christian Science Monitor article