A panel to the Japanese financial regulator gave the green light this week for a proposal requiring listed companies to disclose any gender gaps in their workforce in line with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's aim of addressing Japan's gender pay inequality, one of the worst among developed countries, reports The Mainichi. Under the rules approved by the panel on corporate disclosure, the Financial Services Agency will require 4,000 or so listed firms in the country to include gender disparities in pay, management jobs, and the rate of male employees taking child-care leave in their annual financial reports.

The approval comes as the prime minister aims to revise regulations for female empowerment by the summer and urge companies to disclose the status of their workplace gender equality. The government plans to implement tougher disclosure rules on gender equality, requiring all companies with more than 300 employees to provide wage gap data on their web pages. There are currently 17,600 such firms in the country. The current rules require these companies to disclose information in at least two of 15 categories of gender gap data, but a decision on which data to disclose is left to companies. Currently, women's pay overall is about 20% lower than men's, according to the Cabinet Office. Government data also showed that in 2021, females held only 13.2% of managerial positions in Japan.