When Kindness Becomes the Ceiling: Masako Aragane on DEI Practice in Japanese Companies and Impostor Syndrome

Contents

1. ”Women don’t want management roles” — does that hold up?
2. How does a manager’s goodwill turn into an obstacle?
3. Which company does it in the bones?
4. Does sending male managers to daycare actually do anything?
5. Can anyone actually measure something as old as the pay gap?
6. So what can I use myself?
7. Sources worth checking
8. One thing to take away

It is not being unknown to others that troubles me; it is not knowing others.

—— Analects, Book I (Spring and Autumn period; translation mine)

On the 27 September 2026 episode of InterFM’s Investor’s Sunday, hosts Rie Murayama and Yuko Ezure welcomed Masako Aragane, CEO of Qualia Inc. and a DEI consultant, to talk about what Japanese companies are doing in practice — and about impostor syndrome, a subject she has worked on for years. Aragane’s point is that two things happen at once: a woman’s own sense that she isn’t good enough, and her manager’s well-meant “don’t put yourself through that.” Among the companies she named, Kirin has male managers pick up female colleagues’ children from daycare five days running, and Mercari narrowed the portion of its gender pay gap it could find no reason for to 1.4%. Worth noting: these are large listed Japanese firms with slack in their HR systems that a smaller company doesn’t have, so the mechanics don’t transfer directly.

”Women don’t want management roles” — does that hold up?

Not as an explanation. Aragane says the three lines she hears most are that women don’t want management, aren’t suited to it, and that the company would love to promote them but they refuse. Childcare and responsibility are real constraints. Her focus lands elsewhere: women whose track record is plainly good enough rate themselves far below it.

That contradiction is where the research started — why do demonstrably excellent women lack confidence? Later work moved it off personality and onto structure: minorities feel pressure, and speaking up inside a majority is harder. Aragane’s own checklist splits it into three types with names that stick: “not yet good enough,” “I just got lucky,” and “any day now they’ll find out.” She demonstrated the second one live — my being invited today, and Murayama being asked, is just someone happening to call, nothing to do with ability.

What stopped me was Murayama’s reaction. She said she has spent decades telling herself not to think this way, and yet after a big presentation she has genuinely hoped the next meeting would get cancelled for some reason. If that happens to someone who has interviewed around eighty guests, this isn’t a handful of people with a confidence problem.

How does a manager’s goodwill turn into an obstacle?

Because goodwill doesn’t need the other person’s consent. Aragane calls it benevolent discrimination: for someone raising children, caring for a parent, or back from treatment, the manager has already settled the answer — this will be hard on you, skip it; go home early; there’s a quieter department, no travel, no overtime, no client dinners, let me move you. Asking for that yourself is one thing. Having it decided for you is another.

She told her daughter’s story. Two children, now nine and eight; she went back to work two months after the second was born. Her boss, seeing a two-month-old and an eighteen-month-old in daycare, told her to get home at the first sign of trouble. The daughter had moved near Aragane — money from the mother, hands from the father, backup arranged. After enough rounds of “it’s fine, go,” what she started thinking was: am I being treated as unnecessary?

When NHK covered impostor syndrome, someone gave Aragane a word: fusion. From anime — two unremarkable demons combine into the strongest one. The boss thinks she probably can’t, poor thing. The woman thinks I’m not there yet, I can’t. Neither party intends harm, and together they form a ceiling no one can point at.

Then she named the part that outlasts the feelings: experience capital. Experience leading people, developing them, owning a room — the gap in volume compounds. So even where ability is even, the male colleague who kept getting sent into those rooms looks like the better fit a few years later. Feelings can be talked through; the skipped years can’t be repaid.

Which company does it in the bones?

Aragane named Hitachi. Her evidence is the turn after the 2009 loss: talent thinking swung wholesale to global talent, and the share of the board that rose internally fell, with more non-Japanese and mid-career members. Recently they branded their sustainability strategy PLEDGES — planet, leadership, empowerment, diverse perspectives, governance, engagement, sustainability — with diversity living inside the management strategy rather than in a separate diversity policy document.

The part that marks a real difference comes next. Quantifying diversity outcomes is the old sore point of this field. Hitachi worked with a Kyoto University researcher to put causal figures on it: employee engagement’s contribution to revenue, governance and compliance suppressing SG&A, diverse perspectives affecting cost of capital, inclusion linked to satisfaction and ROA. What Aragane values is that because the numbers exist, people inside the company know why they are doing this, instead of having been handed a task.

Murayama added a date: from 2027, listed companies above a certain market cap must disclose sustainability information under SSBJ. Her own realisation, which I’ll quote: she had taken those firms to be good at disclosure, and only now saw the order runs the other way — there is something to disclose because the work is in the daily business.

Aragane followed with a story from 2000. She visited a European socially responsible investment firm, which told her Japanese companies don’t report the bad things, and don’t report the good things either, so they score low. Trusting that diligent work gets noticed no longer works. Ezure’s line made me laugh: you tell people to watch your back, but there’s nothing written on it.

Does sending male managers to daycare actually do anything?

It does, on one condition: they aren’t allowed to opt out. Kirin has run this for years, out of a women’s training project. Most section chiefs are men, so male chiefs collect a female employee’s child from daycare, take them home, and mind them until the parent returns — five days.

One exchange carries the whole thing. A chief called HR to say a meeting had landed at five and he couldn’t make the pickup. HR told him no, go. That is your colleague’s ordinary working day. Aragane points out he then has to rebuild the whole day around it, and register at the daycare first, because staff won’t hand a child to someone they’ve never met. Kirin later extended the programme to eldercare, open to men and women alike.

On the same track, Ezure had seen footage of men wearing a belt that runs current through the abdomen to simulate menstrual pain. Aragane says they were shocked — this is what it feels like, and you work while carrying it. She cited a study putting the annual economic loss from leaving women’s health issues unaddressed in Japan at roughly ¥3.4 trillion.

What I took from this section is how fast imagination decays with seniority — which is where “short hours, so it’s easier” and “people on childcare leave must have free time” come from. The reality is multitasking sliced into minutes. Reading about it doesn’t correct the error; those five days have to happen to you.

Can anyone actually measure something as old as the pay gap?

Mercari did. Japan began requiring disclosure of the gender pay gap in annual securities reports last year, and they broke theirs down to hunt for the portion with no justification. One cause: many mid-career hires, with pay set from the previous employer’s level — and since Japanese women earn around 70% of what men earn, the old gap gets imported wholesale. After topping up the part they couldn’t explain, the internal gap came down to 1.4%.

I like the sequence: admit the gap, split it into explained and unexplained, fund only the second pile. The distance between that and “we care about this too” is the distance between 1.4% and a slogan.

Aragane gave the other side too. Japanese corporate websites carry rows of certifications, marks and index inclusions, and then you walk through the automatic doors and inside it’s the old world. Her phrase for it: building an alibi. Training happens, nothing follows it, no development programme connects to it, and finishing counts as done. Marui runs it the other way — its own KPIs tracking male parental leave uptake and the share of women in management, targets for men’s and women’s health issues, then policies built backwards from those; women hold over 30% of board seats and 23% of management roles. SWCC, formerly Showa Electric Wire, has a woman as chair and signed a comprehensive DEI partnership with Shibaura Institute of Technology, because technical female talent is scarce — women are about 20% of science and engineering students in Japan, while Shibaura’s female intake this year passed 30%. Reaching down into middle schools, high schools and universities like this is called community outreach; US firms have done it for twenty-odd years.

So what can I use myself?

Aragane’s closing message to listeners is the most usable part of the episode. Changing systems and structures takes a long time, she says, and your mindset doesn’t need changing — widen the angle you’re looking at by fifteen degrees. I keep coming back to that number, because it concedes that nobody turns into a different person overnight.

She named three capacities. Metacognition: pull back from the self that’s bound to the problem and the profit in front of you, and you get the room to ask whether this is appropriate. Imagination: with people unlike us it doesn’t engage, so we substitute ourselves for them, or jump to right and wrong. And questioning: before saying what you want to say, hear what the other person wants to say, draw out their thinking with questions, and give your own view after that. Everyone is racing to produce answers, she says, with question and answer wired straight together, and trust doesn’t grow in that.

The third is the one I keep failing. A colleague is still talking and I already have my conclusion, so the rest of the time is spent waiting. Last week’s guest, Mr Itoh, raised the same point with a rule attached: never say “yes, yes, I know, it’s that thing, right.” Once that’s out, you won’t hear the version they were about to give you.

Sources worth checking

• InterFM Investor’s Sunday, 27 September 2026. Guest: Masako Aragane, CEO of Qualia Inc., DEI consultant. DJs: Rie Murayama, Yuko Ezure. This was also Ezure’s final episode after three years and roughly eighty guests.
• Hitachi’s PLEDGES sustainability strategy and related disclosures.
• Kirin’s childcare and menstrual-pain experience programmes.
• Mercari’s gender pay gap analysis and its “plain Japanese” training.
• Marui Group’s in-house KPIs; SWCC’s DEI partnership with Shibaura Institute of Technology.
• SSBJ sustainability disclosure requirements from 2027.

One thing to take away

Consideration has to be asked for first; unasked-for consideration narrows the road it was meant to protect. Aragane’s line about bosses deciding without hearing the person hit me about workplaces first and about my own household second.

Here’s something I’ve tried. This week, pick one occasion where you shielded someone — you kept them off the stage, took the call for them, sat on the bad news, did the hard part yourself — and go ask them: “I assumed you’d rather not deal with this. Did I get that right?” Then only listen; don’t explain your reasoning at the time. Murayama described a boss hinting that the next level up would break her, and answering, “Thank you, but that’s mine to decide.” He was a smart man, said sorry, and she got the promotion. She could say that sentence because her boss was in the habit of hearing people out.

Raw Markdown

This article is an educational discussion of investment method. It is not advice to buy or sell any individual security, offers no target prices, and does not analyze any current holding. Investing carries risk; make your own decisions or consult a qualified professional.