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Sanae Takaichi made history on Tuesday when she became Japan’s first female prime minister. But hours after she was elected by MPs, it was evident that female under representation in the country’s political establishment would continue when she appointed just two women to her cabinet.
Takaichi had promised levels of female representation in her government comparable to those in Iceland, Finland and Norway.
Satsuki Katayama, who became the first woman to hold the post of finance minister, was joined by Kimi Onoda as economic security minister in Takaichi’s 19-member cabinet.
Six of Iceland’s 11 cabinet members are women, including the prime minister, Kristrún Frostadóttir, and in Finland women occupy 11 of 19 cabinet posts.
Takaichi’s immediate predecessor, Shigeru Ishiba, appointed two women to his cabinet but the record is five, under Ishiba’s predecessor Fumio Kishida.
Takaichi, an ultra-conservative whose Liberal Democratic party (LDP) has formed a coalition with a minor party that shares her hawkish approach to defence and revisionist views on wartime history, has said she wants to raise awareness of women’s health and has spoken about her own experience of menopause.
But like her political hero Margaret Thatcher, Takaichi will be guided by the social conservatism that made her the popular choice among MPs and rank-and-file members on the right of the LDP when she ran for the party leadership this month.
She opposes revising a 19th-century law requiring married couples to use the same surname, arguing that allowing women to retain their maiden names would chip away at traditional family values.
She also opposes calls for changes to succession laws to allow female members of the imperial household – which has few male heirs – to become reigning empresses. She has spoken out against discrimination towards members of the LGBTQ+ community, but opposes same-sex marriage.
“The prospect of a first female prime minister doesn’t make me happy,” the sociologist Chizuko Ueno said in a post on X. Takaichi’s leadership would elevate Japan’s gender equality ranking, Ueno said, but added “that doesn’t mean Japanese politics will become kinder to women”.
Others were optimistic that Takaichi’s appointment would lower the psychological barriers to women entering public life. “There is great significance in Takaichi becoming prime minister, with a broader impact on society,” Naomi Koshi, who became Japan’s youngest female mayor in 2012 aged 36, told the Kyodo news agency.
Takaichi had a comparatively small pool of female MPs from which to appoint her cabinet. Even though a record 73 women were elected in last year’s lower house elections, they still comprise only 15.7% of the chamber’s 465 MPs.
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 gender gap index, Japan ranked 118th out of 148 countries.
Agencies contributed reporting.
