Japanese Unaccustomed to Either : Roles of Working Women, Minorities Pose Challenge

A group of executives from Japan was visiting the Los Angeles-area headquarters of their American subsidiary recently when one asked a woman at a meeting if she would make copies of some documents he was carrying.

“I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘No, but I’ll have my secretary do it,’ ” recalled the woman, the only female among the more than 50 managers in her division.

The incident captured the flavor of the sharp differences between the roles of women in the workplace in Japan and the United States. Similar conflicts, some less benign, are occurring with increasing frequency across the country as rising numbers of Americans go to work at the U.S. operations of Japanese companies.

While complaints are not yet widespread, some management and labor experts warn that the treatment of women could become a major social and economic issue as more Japanese companies set up shop in the United States over the next decade.

And the controversy is likely to spread to minorities, although many Japanese manufacturers have so far avoided--critics say deliberately--starting new plants in areas with big concentrations of minorities.

Despite the chorus of complaints, some women and minorities said they have found opportunities with the Japanese that equal or surpass their chances with American-owned companies.

Their upbeat experiences reflect both the diversity of the Japanese-owned companies operating in the United States and progress by Japanese managers in adapting to the demands of the American workplace.

“There is a basic philosophy here of respecting the individual,” said Susan J. Insley, vice president of corporate planning at Honda’s American manufacturing arm in Marysville, Ohio, and one of the highest-ranking women in the auto industry in this country. “It doesn’t seem to make any difference, whether you are a woman or a man.”

Yet problems remain because of the striking cultural differences between Japan and the United States. And nowhere are those differences more apparent than in attitudes toward women and minorities. Responding to the inevitable tensions sparked by the conflicting views is one of the most pressing challenges confronting Japanese managers in this country.

“There are important cultural differences in the hiring of women and often little experience in the hiring of minorities in Japan,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor at UC San Diego and an expert on the workplace. “As there are more Japanese firms here, there will be more attention paid to their operating practices because they will be affecting more and more people and there will be more instances where you have that cultural gap.”

Mikel E. Duffy discovered the gap soon after going to work in the New York office of C. Itoh & Co., the American arm of a giant Japanese trading company.

Did Own Clerical Work

Duffy started in the finance division in 1982, handling fund transfers between accounts and eventually supervising millions of dollars a day in transactions. But she rarely dealt directly with the Japanese managers, and she did her own clerical work despite her increased responsibilities.

“One of the impressions I got was that the Japanese had a difficult time conceptualizing women as equals,” Duffy said. “As a rule, the Japanese men were uncomfortable relaying information directly to me. It was like a Maypole dance.”

There were other signals that Duffy interpreted as indicative of an uneven playing field. When the bankers with whom Duffy did business over the telephone visited C. Itoh, she was never introduced to them. She had no business cards, and her attempts to get clerical help were unsuccessful although she never got an outright no, a frequent complaint about Japanese managers.

“It was such a benign, friendly sort of discrimination,” Duffy said. “In one sense, that makes it more frightening. You don’t get the sense of an evil presence or something you get immediately irate about. There was no ‘slap and tickle,’ as my grandfather would put it.”

Nonetheless, Duffy believed that her advancement was blocked unfairly and joined two other women in filing a sex discrimination complaint against C. Itoh and ultimately a federal lawsuit, which is pending. The company refused to comment.

Duffy’s observations were echoed by the woman manager who declined to copy documents for the visiting executive. The woman, who did not want her name used, said she is the only manager with no staff except a secretary.

When she voices her opinions at meetings, she said, the Japanese bosses seem to regard her as pushy and too aggressive. But she said the obstacles she has encountered in six years with the company have made her more determined to succeed in working for the Japanese.

Such experiences reflect the difficulty that Japanese managers are having adjusting to assertive, career-oriented American women.

In Japan, women earn about half what men do, and they are expected to leave their jobs to raise a family after marrying by the age of 24 or 25. The small percentage of women who do not leave work or who return after having children tends to be relegated to part-time clerical positions.

‘Closed to Women in Japan’

“Most doors are closed to women in Japan,” said a Japanese woman who moved to the United States after she felt her career had been stymied in Tokyo. She is an executive in Los Angeles and did not want her name disclosed.

Michael K. Young, director of Japanese legal studies at Columbia University in New York City, recalled a recent lawsuit in Japan against a broadcasting company by two women dismissed from their jobs at age 30.

“One of the male executives said something to the effect that ‘I fired my female employees because they are not so beautiful after 30,’ ” Young said.

Only recently has a women’s movement begun in Japan, and women managers in business are rare. Young said a survey of 310,000 junior managers in Japan found less than 1/2% were women. An examination of five diverse Japanese companies last year by the Council on Economic Priorities, a nonprofit research organization in New York, found no women among 1,493 managers.

International attention was focused on the plight of minorities in Japan in 1986 when Yasuhiro Nakasone, then the prime minister, suggested that blacks, Latinos and other minorities pull down educational levels in the United States.

Nakasone later apologized but not until after his remark ignited a furor in the United States that highlighted the cultural and racial sameness of Japan and the corresponding discrimination against the few minority groups in the country.

About 700,000 Koreans make up the largest minority group in a nation of 120 million, and few white-collar jobs are available to them. Even Koreans born in Japan can be denied citizenship.

Proud of Homogeneity

The Japanese are proud of their homogeneity and see it as a primary factor in their economic success. That forms the outlook of Japanese executives sent to the United States to run subsidiaries of Japan-based corporations, and their adjustment to U.S. laws and culture can be difficult and confusing.

Already their hiring and promotion practices have attracted the scrutiny of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that monitors compliance with anti-discrimination laws.

“Homogeneity is antagonistic to what we believe in this country,” Clarence Thomas, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said in an interview. “I don’t think we should import those approaches which are antagonistic to civil rights or to equal employment opportunity laws in this country.”

Thomas said the agency is investigating the conduct of Japanese companies in the United States to see whether they are discriminating against minorities or women.

Judith Keeler, director of the commission’s district office in Los Angeles, said there have been complaints about Japanese-owned companies failing to promote minorities, women and older people. She also said there have been complaints about Japanese-owned banks, real estate firms and other companies failing to hire or promote non-Japanese.

Keeler said her office is studying whether there is a pattern of discrimination, adding, “The jury is still out on that.”

Pattern Found at Honda

In March, the commission’s Washington office announced that just such a pattern had been found at the U.S. manufacturing division of Honda, which employs 5,900 people at three plants in the Marysville, Ohio, area. The Japanese car maker agreed to pay $6 million to 377 female and black employees as a result of past discrimination in hiring and promotion.

A year ago, Sumitomo Corp. of America agreed to pay $2.6 million and institute broad employment reforms in settling a federal lawsuit that accused the Japanese-owned trading company of favoring Japanese and American males over women. The case took 12 years to resolve and generated a Supreme Court ruling that civil rights laws apply to U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies.

“We have spoken to women from many other subsidiaries of Japanese corporations, and they have given us the same story,” said Lewis M. Steel, a partner with the New York law firm of Steel, Bellman & Levine. He handled the Sumitomo lawsuit and represents women in similar actions against two other Japanese-owned companies.

“Women are treated as inferiors,” Steel said. “They are expected to serve coffee or tea, but they are not expected to deal with outside clients. To get even minimal promotions they have got to be superwomen.”

A study last year by New York’s Columbia University Graduate School of Business found that 2% of the management positions in Japanese-owned firms in the United States were held by women in 1985, a figure that was unchanged from 1982.

By contrast, about 37% of the managers in American-owned companies in this country last year were women, and a decade before the figure was 24%.

Kathleen J. Erickson believes that sex discrimination stood in the way of her promotion to management at Nissan’s U.S. sales and distribution center in Carson, where she sat for months at a corner desk with no responsibilities.

CPA With Master’s Degree

Erickson, a Peace Corps veteran, viewed working for the Japanese as exciting when she went to work at Nissan’s financing arm in March, 1987. She was a certified public accountant with a master’s degree in management information systems.

Soon after she started at Nissan, her division’s systems analysts were transferred to the main sales and distribution operation. Erickson said she was promised a promotion within a month or two of the transfer. She waited.

After two months, she said, she complained to her supervisor. A short time later, a man was hired and given the job she believed that she had been promised.

“I started telling people I thought it was sex discrimination,” Erickson said. “Somebody handed me a piece of paper with a name and number on it, and I called.”

The number was for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission headquarters in Washington, where an unpublicized investigation of hiring and promotion practices at Nissan had been under way for more than two years. A commission caseworker told Erickson that she could either file a complaint or try to work out the problems with Nissan. Erickson decided to first try the company, and she met with personnel officials to air her complaint.

A week after the meeting, she was demoted, her duties were reassigned to someone else, and she was told to take courses in computers that duplicated material she had covered in college and graduate school. Last spring, Erickson filed a complaint with the commission accusing Nissan of sex discrimination. Last week, she resigned in frustration.

Ronald D. Cabibi, Nissan’s personnel chief, said Erickson was the victim of nothing more than her own lack of technical skills. He said the company tried to help her learn the skills she needed through the computer course.

Cabibi also said the broader commission inquiry into Nissan’s employment practices should soon result in a negotiated settlement, but he declined to discuss details of that investigation.

There is no universal truth that explains relations between Japanese employers and the women and minorities they employ. Evidence seems ample that tensions exist and problems must be solved. But some Americans echoed Honda’s Susan Insley in saying they found good opportunities working for the Japanese.

Bias Called Home-Grown

Margaret S. Henry, who worked at a management level as a lawyer for Toyota’s U.S. sales and distribution headquarters in Torrance, said the bias she encountered was home-grown. It came from her countrymen imported to Southern California from Detroit.

“The Americans often wondered what a woman was doing working for an auto maker,” said Henry, who spent six years at Toyota before going into private practice in Los Angeles. “It would be hard to get past the Americans and accuse the Japanese of discrimination.”

Potential conflicts, however, were on Henry’s mind before she took the Toyota job, and she asked another lawyer whose law firm had many Japanese clients how he thought a woman would be treated.

“He said the Japanese tend to look upon American women as a third sex and that they are actually very good at working with them,” Henry said. “After I went to work there, I found that that was true. They don’t treat you like a man, and underneath it all they may suspect you are not as good as a man, but that does not mean they don’t take your advice or respect your opinion.”

Denise M. Garrison worked for two U.S. manufacturers before going to work on the production line at Honda’s Marysville auto plant three years ago. Since then she has risen to assistant manager of the material services department, which monitors the flow of parts into the plant. Her immediate boss is Japanese, as are 38 of the 332 employees in the department.

“I think it was actually a trial to see how the first women did, how they progressed,” Garrison said. Once the Japanese managers saw women could do the job, she said, the doors were opened to them.

“Your ability that you bring with you and the achievement that you display, that is how you are judged here,” Garrison said. “Actually I think I’m treated fairer here than I was before.”

Honda has been regarded as one of the most progressive Japanese firms in the United States, and a recent Business Week cover story hailed its “Americanization.” So the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission case was something of a surprise.

Reforms Instituted, Honda Says

Honda executives maintained that the company had instituted the reforms sought by the government before the settlement was announced in March, such as expanding its recruitment of blacks and promoting more women.

The company said one reason for the shortage of blacks in its work force was an agreement with Marysville officials to give first choice for jobs to residents from the surrounding area, where few blacks live.

Japanese manufacturers have concentrated their new plants in rural areas of the Midwest, where whites predominate and unions are traditionally weak. This means that they often do not draw from a labor pool containing large numbers of minorities.

Some critics contend that the Japanese have deliberately sought to avoid hiring minorities by selecting white rural areas for their new plants, and others say what the Japanese managers are really more interested in avoiding is union workers. The Japanese say their decisions are based solely on geography and cost.

Black production workers who have gone to work for the Japanese--for instance, about 17% of Nissan’s work force in Smyrna, Tenn., is black--said they find few differences between Japanese-owned firms and those owned by U.S. companies.

“You might even be treated a little better because the team approach to doing things evens things out some,” said a black factory worker outside a Los Angeles-area food-processing plant owned by a Japanese firm.

Jonathan Souder, a quality-control engineer in the San Diego factory of Japan’s Kyocera, a leading producer of ceramic products for high-tech uses, said some of the questions during his interview process were a bit strange. But he said he has adapted to working for the Japanese without difficulty.

Like women, few blacks have made it to the management level at U.S. subsidiaries of Japanese companies.

One former manager, who asked that his name not be used and that his former employer not be identified, said the discrimination was subtle and not particularly harmful during several years of working for a Japanese-owned company.

‘Knew You Were Different’

“You always knew you were different, not part of any inner circle,” the former manager said. “I had consciously gone to work at a Japanese firm because I thought the prejudices might not be as strong as at an American company. I just finally figured that I wasn’t going any higher, so I left. I think it was a little worse because I was black, but I think the white managers sensed the same predicament.”

While they come to the task with some decided handicaps, the Japanese also bring the advantages of a consensus-style of management that can equalize the decision-making process and strip away some traditional barriers to progress for women and minorities.

The Japanese companies that will be successful in the United States are those that can harness the strengths of the entrenched American system to the often contradictory values of the Japanese system.

‘A Joint Venture’

“What we should really avoid are extremes,” said Yukuo Takenaka, a partner at the accounting firm of Peat Marwick Main and a frequent adviser to Japanese companies. “When companies come here, I tell them to think of this as a joint venture, even if they are buying the company completely, because they will be using primarily American workers and have American customers.

“My concept is that we have got to bring hybrid enterprises, with the good aspects of Japan ways and American ways.”

William H. Davidson, a professor of international management at USC, predicted that the Japanese will be slow to shed their traditional practices when it comes to dealing with women and minorities, which may lead to even bigger problems in the American workplace before there are improvements. But he also believes that the Japanese will adapt eventually.

“The Japanese will manage the pressures in their own way,” Davidson said. “It will be a gradual, almost invisible transition. Then perhaps the developments in the United States will be transported back to Japan.”