Efforts to raise Japan's dismal female participation in the workforce should generate significant economic benefits, the head of the U.N. Development Program said.

"If women's participation here came up to something more like the average, that would be very beneficial for growth, development and prosperity in Japan, because you bring more people functioning into the economy," Helen Clark, the first woman to head the UNDP, said in an interview Wednesday.

The participation rate for Japan's women was the second-lowest in the Group of Eight nations at 48.1 percent in 2012, according to the latest Human Development Report, issued Thursday by the UNDP.