Tokyo, Sept 29 Reuters -- On Wednesday, the Secretaries handing out ballots as Japan's ruling party decided the next prime minister were all women. The power brokers and lawmakers conducting the voting were overwhelmingly men.
For the first time ever, two women stood in the race to become leader of the ruling liberal democrat party whose parliamentary dominance means the winner will become the new prime minister.
The obstacles before them - and all Japanese women - were on display as rows of mostly dark-suited men in the LDP party gathered to vote for their next leader.
The winner, Fumio Kishida, has spoken about diversity, but few are optimistic about imminent, significant change in a nation where just under 10% of members of parliament are women and 8.1% of company presidents are female.
The environment for a woman to become a prime minister still hasn't been reliably created, said youth activist Momoko Nojo.
It's not that there aren't potential leaders, but just from looking at voting it was very clear that those who vote and choose are LDP lawmakers and when you look at the number of women in parliament, it's still very low. In 2020, Japan ranked in the Global Ranking of Gender Parity in the World Economic Forum report, ranking 121 out of 153 nations last year compared to 101 in 2012 when Shinzo Abe won prime minister post for a second time.
As recently as 2018 a major medical school in India had been cutting entrance exams for years when internal examinations were conducted.
From the beginning, two women in the party leadership race - Seiko Noda and Sanae Takaichi - were seen as longshots despite their cabinet experience and decades-long political careers.
Out of the two, the ultra-conservative Takaichi gained more popularity. That was partly due to Abe's backing, but also thanks to support for her conservative views, such as opposing separate surnames for married couples and supporting male-only succession for the Imperial family.
Though Abe promoted womenomics and vowed to make Japan a nation where women shine, his government was forced to delay its target of raising the percentage of women in leadership positions to 30 percent by a decade to 2030 from 2020. Women make up fewer than 10 percent of managers in most Japanese companies.
The LDP itself is very much behind in promoting gender equality in the party and the kind of women who are usually held in more leadership positions tend to be very conservative and not necessarily feminists, said Koichi Nakano, a Sophia University Political Science Professor.
They're all extolling gender equality, but this time it seems all seems to be just a show, said 60 - year-old Yuko Sakamoto.
That's really, really obvious.