Ambassador Kennedy’s Opening Remarks at The Huffington Post Japan’s One-Year Anniversary Event

3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo

May 27, 2014

Good evening and thank you for inviting me to be part of this exciting event. I’d like to congratulate The Huffington Post on its one-year anniversary of launching here in Japan. The discussion you will be having tonight is just the kind of dialogue The Huffington Post is creating online, so it’s exciting to be taking part in this event. This is a critical time to be discussing the challenges of balancing work and family and I am eager to hear your thoughts and to be part of the continuing conversation as Japan moves forward.

As the first woman to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Japan, I know that I am a symbol of change as well. The reception I have received here, and the eagerness of people at all levels of society, both men and women, to advance this issue has underscored for me the power and importance of individual action to bring about larger social change. 

Japanese women have done it before. During the Meiji period, and in the first decades of the 20th century, women fought hard for the right to vote, just like their British and American sisters.

In the 1950s, Japanese nurses pressed to transform the way their work was seen in Japan. They wanted nursing to be respected as a serious profession, not just something women did for a few years before they got married. Thanks to their efforts, the proportion of married nurses rose from a mere 2 percent in 1958 to about 70 percent by the 1980s.

In the United States, it was a Japanese-American, Patsy Takemoto Mink, who became the first Asian-American and first woman of color elected to Congress.  She was the co-author and driving force behind the landmark legislation known as Title IX, which mandated that any institution receiving federal funds treat men and women equally. Later renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, Title IX opened up higher education and athletics to women and has transformed American society.

Women like these fought for us – and we can’t let their efforts go to waste. Along with our own mothers, grandmothers, and teachers, their example can inspire and guide us when we are struggling to succeed in a man’s world, to balance work and family, to choose a career or just find a paying job, to manage a household, to raise young children, and to care for aging parents. Those are challenges common to all women. And they can be especially difficult in a society like Japan with a long history of culturally defined gender.

But Japan has proven over and over again that when a national consensus develops, rapid progress is possible. In so many ways, this is a defining moment. The U.S.-Japan alliance is strong and multi-faceted. Both countries are fortunate to have leaders who are committed to women’s economic empowerment. Prime Minister Abe has laid out an ambitious agenda in the security, energy and economic arenas – and the economic empowerment of women is central to its success. Studies show that increasing the participation of women could boost GDP by as much as 16%. He has ignited a national debate, government agencies and companies are responding, and progress is being made.

I do not want to suggest that we have solved this problem in the United States, but like Japan, we also have a leader who gets it. President Obama is the son of a single mother, who had to accept government assistance to feed her family for a period of time. He is the husband of a woman who grew up in one of the poorest, most dangerous neighborhoods in the United States, and worked her way to Princeton and Harvard Law School because she believed in herself and in the American dream. In 2009, his first act as President was to sign the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which empowers women to fight pay discrimination in the workplace.

In order to take advantage of this moment, we need to be honest about the obstacles women face.  And we also need to be honest about the fact that there are great differences in opportunity for educated women and women who haven’t received a college degree, as well as between married women and single mothers. Today we are talking primarily about empowerment for educated professional women with skills that are in high demand -- but we should not forget that for many women, staying above the poverty line is job #1. With almost 15% of children in Japan and 23% of American children growing up in poverty, that is a lot of desperate mothers.

In the U.S., poverty is a women’s issue. Nearly six in ten poor adults are women, and more than half of all poor children live in families headed by women. In Japan, the relative poverty rate is 16%. Child poverty in working single parent households, usually headed by women, is 50 % -- making Japan the only country where having a job doesn't reduce the poverty rate.

The suffering of these families is all the more reason that those of us who are fortunate enough to have an education and a job need to redouble our commitment to women’s empowerment.  

For educated working women like those of us in this room, things are looking up.  Women in both the U.S. and Japan receive more than half the college degrees, and the jobs of the future need skilled and educated workers. As both economies transition from manufacturing to service, women’s skills will be increasingly favored. In order to speed up the process, we need to ask what the most significant barriers to women’s advancement are -- and what can each sector of society do to address them.

Government needs to work with business to ease the regulatory environment, promote flexibility in the workplace, and increase childcare options. Large companies need to create the pipeline so that women can rise to the top over the course of their careers. Workplace accommodations for working mothers are urgently needed so that these talented women are not forced out of their jobs when they start a family. Countless management studies show that companies with high-level participation by women are more profitable and better run, and that giving people more flexibility in their work schedules not only increases job satisfaction, but also increases productivity.

In a 2011 study in the U.S. by the highly-respected Pew Research Center, 72% of women and men between the ages of 18 and 29 agreed that the best marriage is one in which husband and wife both work and take care of the house. When husband and wife function as a team, to work and raise their children, it creates a strong bond and mutual understanding. 

And for people  who worry that working outside of the home means women have  less time  to raise their children, another Pew Research Center study released last year found that in the United States, where working couples are the norm, the amount of time parents spend with their children is actually increasing. From 1965 to the present, fathers have nearly tripled the time spent with their kids and surprisingly, today’s American children spend more time with their mothers than they did in the 1960s.

We can’t all be the first female Prime Minister, or President, or CEO but we can all become architects of change in our own lives. And each time we stand up for ourselves, ask our husbands to help us a little more, pitch in for a colleague at work who has a sick child at home, convince a manager that doing a good job need not mean staying till 8 o’clock every night , we change the world around us – and those tiny changes add up. They give us the confidence to continue, and the courage to believe that we are part of something larger than ourselves. They give us the knowledge that our efforts will make it easier for our daughters to succeed, and for our sons to experience more of the joys of family life. They  send out a ripple of hope which touches every life we touch and is passed on to all the lives they touch in turn .So each act is magnified -- and over time and across generations we transform the lives of people we will never know .

In the United States, we have made progress but we still have a long way to go.  In Japan, you are the generation that can change history. Not everyone is lucky enough to get that chance. Every single person in this room can play a role in bringing women more fully into leadership positions in all fields. It’s the right thing for your country, for your family, and for your future. 

Thank you and Ganbatte.