This series explores topics surrounding women who began their careers in Japan following the implementation of equal opportunities employment legislation in the mid-1980s. With many now reaching the age of retirement, it is hoped their stories can provide insight and lessons for women in Japan's working world today.
Masami Katakura, the first chairwoman of a "big four" accounting firm in Japan, is the face of Ernst & Young (EY) ShinNihon — literally. Mere steps after entering EY’s office in Hibiya Midtown, Tokyo, you are greeted by her radiant smile emanating from the covers of Accountant’s Magazine, prominently stacked in rows on the office magazine rack.
“When the face of someone you know is pasted on the cover, it gets awkward tossing these copies in the recycling bin,” joked 53-year-old Katakura when I mention this, “I’m forever stuck on display.” Her unassuming laughter is infectious.
The chair of the partnership behind accounting firm EY ShinNihon is democratically elected by its 550 partners under a system of one-partner, one-vote. Katakura's glass-ceiling-shattering victory in 2019 was a milestone for the Japanese accounting industry, known for its conservatism.
But what motivated her to run for office in 2019?
“I just wanted to pave the path for the women following behind me,” said Katakura. “At first, I was reluctant because it would look like (I was) screaming ‘me-me-me,’ but in the end, I could not contradict what I was telling my female colleagues — to grab a chance and go for it.” Breaking through the glass ceiling is one way to pave a path — and Katakura's story contains real-life remedies for the social inertia that weighs women down in the professional services industry.
Growing up in a family in which nearly all the women worked, Katakura found her vocation early. Throughout her childhood, spending time at the office of her aunt, a tax accountant’s assistant, she was impressed with how small business owners were appreciative of professional service support.
“They showered my aunt and her colleagues with thank-you gifts — the office was always filled with goodies every child would dream of, and I certainly liked that,” she said.
After graduating from Meiji University and passing the CPA examination in 1991, she joined Showa Ota & Co., now EY ShinNihon. It had been five years since the enactment of the equal employment opportunity law.
“On our client’s side (which tended to be middle to upper managers), it was 100% older men,” she said.
“They did not relegate female accountants to tasks like pouring tea at meetings, as they did to their own female staff,” she added, “but neither was it an equal professional footing for women and men.”
First, some clients concocted remarkable reasons to fend off female professionals. Industries related to natural resources cited the superstition that having women on-site would invite celestial wrath and thus cause natural disasters. The construction sector, Katakura’s desired sector, was out of her reach as her bosses deemed it required too much business travel and client entertainment for women to handle. And in manufacturing, factories did not welcome female accountants for inspections as it was “dangerous for ladies” when in fact, as Katakura dryly pointed out, “they had plenty of women working on the shop floor.”
But what made women, including Katakura, more indignant than the clients’ responses was the behavior of their own male colleagues. She recalled her disbelief when overhearing a male boss bantering with a male client, suggesting how truly annoying it was when a female accountant pointed out an issue.
When it came to promotion, the cost of being a woman was undeniable — “it usually took three to four years to be a project leader for a man. A woman, without exception, needed four to five years.” And the unconscious bias is still there. She adds that employers expect more evidence for the promotion of women than for men.
While many of her female colleagues left frustrated — some of them going independent — Katakura stuck around. Keeping her head down, she kept working and observing — the higher she climbed the corporate ladder, the more acutely she noticed the old boys’ network. At one point, she realized that “some women above me were totally out of the loop, only because they did not join the informal network and therefore missed out on the opportunity to build trust with those in power.”
In the high-context culture of Japanese formal business, direct relationship-building often takes place offline over impromptu drinks after work. Katakura, married in her late 20s but childless, did not mind the last-minute invites. But many women, especially those with children, are at a disadvantage as their informal exposure to colleagues and higher-ups is less frequent than their male peers.
Walking the path of diligent client work and recognition by mostly male peers as “one of us,” Katakura was a rising star. Promoted to partner at the age of 35, she could have easily ended up as another seasoned female partner, well-compensated but outside the inner orbit of leadership. Her defining moment arrived in 2015 after the accounting fraud of a major client came to light, seriously tarnishing the brand of EY ShinNihon, its auditor. The firm found itself in a crisis, losing blue-chip clientele and replacing its senior leadership. In response, the global EY organization dispatched Scott Halliday, a seasoned American executive who formerly led its U.K. division, as a fixer to work alongside Koichi Tsuji, the newly appointed chairman of EY ShinNihon.
It was Halliday, assuming the role of Japan’s Area Managing Partner, who, according to Katakura, “brainwashed” her: “He kept telling me every day that I was destined to be a leader.”
“I don’t think she believed what was possible for her,” Halliday, now retired in the U.S., reflected during a phone interview. She impressed him with her intellectual curiosity and positive attitude — “You cannot be a pessimistic general,” said Halliday. While EY ShinNihon scrambled to get back on its feet, Halliday saw in Katakura an engine for change. She was a hidden talent.
It took some convincing, however.
“Women are not quick to pound their chest,” said Halliday, who added that he “created a safe zone for her while feeding her intellectual curiosity.” In an organization of EY’s scale, with 12,900 partners and more than 300,000 employees worldwide, it is near impossible for a “line partner,” a moniker for a partner without an internal leadership role, to be organically recognized by the global leadership. Fully aware of this handicap, Halliday organized one-on-one meetings for Katakura to connect with global leaders.
At first, Katakura was shy about communicating in English with Halliday. So she kept taking early-morning English lessons. Halliday recounted “a big moment” when Katakura came to talk to him one-on-one without a translator after about 10 meetings. The trust deepened.
Along with Koichi Tsuji, who would succeed Halliday as Area Managing Partner of Japan and whose leadership position atop the assurance business Katakura later occupied, Halliday kept promoting Katakura into leadership positions such as head of Brand, Marketing and Communication in 2016. The firm’s marketing needed a serious facelift, and it needed to be globalized after ShinNihon was converted to EY ShinNihon, more visibly connected to the global EY network.
Perhaps for the first time in her career, being a woman had a tangible benefit for Katakura.
“Because we were careful around the optics of gender balance, we kept positioning her alongside Tsuji in front of our partners,” recounted Moriaki Kida, the current chairperson of EY Japan, who served as deputy to Tsuji at the time. By 2019, “there was no partner within the assurance business that didn’t know her,” said Kida.
In 2019, after four years of turnaround leadership under Tsuji and Halliday, the firm was ready to put the fraud saga of EY ShinNihon’s former client behind it. Katakura, once her mind was made up, made a calculation: “Women leaders have a cleaner image in general. I wanted the world to acknowledge that EY ShinNihon had transformed and was about to make a new beginning with me, a woman, as our new chair.”
Her intention was genuine, and she had enough exposure alongside the incumbent leadership. It also turned out that she was the only candidate running after the vetting of the nomination committee. Still, she needed to secure more than two-thirds of the vote of confidence, which made her nervous.
“I was unable to read how many would be against me. It would have been humiliating to lose (the vote of confidence) as the only candidate. I seriously imagined that I would resign if that happened.” The two-hour pre-vote session with her fellow 550 partners saw a lukewarm start, Katakura said, but she felt that the tone turned positive midway as she answered all the questions with sincerity.
Katakura ran her campaign on two promises: Bringing leaders and frontline staff closer together through communication; and improving audit quality and work-life balance. Under her tenure, the service line started hosting two meetings a month for partners and a town hall meeting for all staff. The attendance rate for partners meetings remains above 90%, high even discounting the effect of remote work under the pandemic. On ensuring audit quality and life quality for her organization, she pursues having the best of both worlds using technology.
“When I started talking about using AI for audit (in 2019), people laughed that it was a pipe dream,” she said. “Now it has become a reality.” It convinced her that if you are right, the world will follow eventually.
Reflecting on her 30-year career, Katakura sounds ambivalent about progress on gender equity at work.
“On one hand, the position of Japanese women in the economy has certainly advanced, triggered by the equal opportunity law,” she said. “But at the same time, after 30 years, it is embarrassing that we have only inched this far.” According to the Gender Gap Index issued by World Economic Forum, Japan ranked dismally at 120th in 2021, sinking to be the lowest among developed economies. Even though the ground formally appears level-set around gender, working women continue to fight an uphill battle against gender-based expectations.
Katakura has practical ideas to help correct gender-biased societal expectations. Thirty years ago, in her cohort of newly certified accountants, 10% were women. Now the ratio has crept up to 25%.
“Twenty-five percent is still unacceptably low, and it stems from gender bias college majors,” said Katakura. Female students tend to favor “soft” majors such as literature over “hard” majors such as economics, accounting, management and law. Katakura attributes the skew to the societal expectation for women: “We must start at a young age, such as teaching accounting to girls in middle school.”
Then, regarding work, the social norm that Katakura describes as a “drinking-networking culture” must change. It requires a mindset change from the bottom up. Consciously building trust during an official, daytime work setting is one point; making men equally responsible for child care is another. And she tries hard to avoid the unconscious bias in promotions where more conservatism is implicitly applied to female candidates.
“I firmly request that the slate (for promotion) contain as many women as possible. We would be neutral in appraising them (against men), but I want these women at least to be on the slate when they meet the formal requirement.”
Instilling a quota of 30% for women in leadership positions in business as well as in politics is something that Katakura endorses. "We have done almost everything when it comes to rules. Japan’s only gap (in contrast to other developed economies) is a quota.”
Meanwhile, she believes that women must improve their game as well. Observing senior professional women within and outside EY, she said that “many women have such untapped potential.” It may be partly due to lack of opportunities and mentors, as Halliday was to Katakura, but she assesses that women are not pushing hard enough.
“Perhaps men are afraid of the competition getting crowded if women also chase leadership positions (so men keep it to themselves),” she said. “We must encourage women to aim higher.”
Her remark resonates with a comment from Halliday: “Women should always be prepared with elevator speeches (for bosses).”
Did Katakura experience any "a-ha" moments after assuming her current leadership role?
“I think I was too preoccupied with the notion of typical male leadership,” she said. “That one has to be technically savvy and lead multiple big accounts and all that.”
Two years into the role, she is now more at ease with her own style. Halliday concurs that Katakura “balances femininity well,” pointing to more empathy and caring for people.
“Women can bring a breadth of leadership styles,” said Katakura, “because women have many faces — the office cannot be a single dominant existence (as it can be for men).” The diversity of style encourages a virtuous cycle of creating a rich pipeline of aspiring women in the next generation.
In addition to her talent and her 30 years of hard work, was there any luck in Katakura’s story? She was certainly lucky to have been discovered by Halliday. But what is important is that her narrative presents a repeatable formula for any employer serious about tapping into the potential of women. Encourage a culture that is unbiased toward gender, and provide mentorship from the top for those hidden gems. These actions pay a hefty dividend when consistently and patiently applied on the ground.
Katakura’s tale is one of a woman in professional services who survived the headwinds and, in the end, leveraged her minority status to her advantage — not to advance her personal agenda but to benefit the organization to which she dedicated her career.
“I hope that my journey encourages the next generation of women,” Katakura said.
As to why she deliberately chose the title of “chairwoman” as opposed to “chairperson,” she said. “We are all tired of being called the first woman of whatever, aren’t we. But it also benefits us for the attention it calls to us. So, why not chairwoman? I am unabashed.”
Nobuko Kobayashi is a partner with EY Strategy and Consulting Co., Ltd., Strategy and Transactions — EY-Parthenon. The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member companies.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.