Japan hosts women-focused conference amid economy push

Tokyo

Japan on Friday kicks off the "World Assembly for Women" conference, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe moves to boost the role of females in the world's third largest economy.

Tokyo will play host to the international conference with Liberian President and Nobel laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Marillyn Hewson, chief executive of US aerospace and security giant Lockheed Martin, among the speakers.

Japan's premier is set to deliver the keynote speech as the two-day conference opens. Since sweeping to power in late 2012 on a ticket to kickstart Japan's flagging economy, the conservative Abe has pledged to push for women to get more senior roles in politics and business as one of the pillars of his Abenomics growth blitz.

The conference starts just hours after a series of weak inflation and spending figures underscore Japan's wobbly economic recovery and the challenges to Abe's efforts to conquer years of deflation and laggard growth.

While he has pushed forward plans for big government spending and massive central bank easing, the pace of promised reforms to Japan's highly regulated economy has proven to be tougher. Among those changes, critics have called for an overhaul of rigid labour rules that tend to favour male workers.

Japan has one of the lowest rates of female workforce participation in the developed world and most economists agree it badly needs to increase the number of working women to grow its economy as the population rapidly ages.

But a lack of childcare facilities, poor career support and deeply entrenched sexism are blamed for keeping women at home, and for one of the lowest birthrates in the developed world as young women see having children as obstacles to their careers.

"Prime Minister Abe is probably the first Japanese leader who has talked about empowering women, and that changed things a lot," said Sayaka Osakabe, head of a nongovernmental organisation that supports pregnant women who are harassed at work. "But in the field, employers' attitudes have not changed drastically yet."