If you've never tried a Japanese snack called Jagariko, I highly recommend it. When I visited the Tokyo offices of Japanese snackmaker Calbee Inc., I made sure to ask if I could have a free pack of my favorite snack. "Maybe," the managers hedged.
I wasn't at Calbee to talk about their potato sticks, but their corporate culture. Calbee is famous in Japan for a progressive, female-friendly workplace. Japan's government has scaled back its ambitions to put more women in corporate management roles, but Calbee is pushing ahead full steam. The company has increased the share of female managers from 5.6 percent in 2010 to 22.1 percent in 2016, and is aiming for 30 percent by the end of the decade.
But Calbee managers explained to me that gender equality is only a small facet of the company's attempts to transform the company's management style. The real goal, they told me, was to shift from a culture that valued input of effort to one that rewarded results, efficiency and productivity. They asserted that female managers are actually more productive than men — where men feel social pressure to stay at work even if nothing needs doing, the Calbee folks said, women feel pressure to finish their tasks quickly and efficiently so they can get home to spend more time with their kids. My interviewees therefore argued that work-life balance, gender equality, and results-oriented management are all just aspects of a unified whole.