Japan Air appoints a former stewardess as company president
The manager is one of the rare women to lead a company in Japan
2' min read
2' min read
Climbing the rungs of a company is not easy in general for a woman, in Japan it is even more so. Yet Mitsuko Tottori has managed the feat of being appointed president of Japan Airlines, the national airline company, a rarity for the Land of the Rising Sun and the air transport sector.
Internal growth difficult
.Although Japanese companies have increased the number of women on their boards in recent years, in line with international standards, most of them come from outside the company because it is very difficult to rise from within. If Japan is not a country for women (at work), the confirmation comes from the gender wage gap, the worst among the G7 countries.
Career
The manager has had to break many 'glass ceilings' since she started her career at JAL in the 1980s first as a stewardess, then as a customer assistant, through the baggage department to security, and today she is one of the few women to lead a major global airline. In the industry, women at the top of airline companies can be counted on the fingers of one hand with the exception of Qantas with Vanessa Hudson as CEO, while Air France and KLM have two women at the top Anne Rigail and Marjan Rintel respectively, reporting to the CEO of the holding company, Ben Smith.
Few women at the top
.In Japan, women make up only 13.4 per cent of CEOs and executive directors when counting the 1,836 companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and of these only 13 per cent are internal hires.
With her appointment, Tottori becomes the fourth president since the airline's bankruptcy in 2010 and the first to have held the position of stewardess. Two of her predecessors came from engineering and maintenance and one was a former pilot. But after their failures to get the carrier back on track, JAL's board decided to try a president who had experience in the trenches, who knew the airline well from the inside.
