Japan’s first female prime minister doesn’t call herself a feminist — but the country needs her to tackle sexism in science

Photo credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty via Nature.com Excerpt from nature.com

Japan struggles with gender equity. It ranked 118th out of 148 countries in the 2025 Global Gender Gap Index. Against this backdrop, the election of a woman, Sanae Takaichi, as Japan’s prime minister on 21 October is a milestone.

But will her rise to the nation’s highest office serve as a catalyst for changing social attitudes? As a woman and a neuroscientist, I have been involved in large surveys on gender equality in Japanese academia, and I feel conflicted.

There is hope. Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner, the Japan Innovation Party (JIP), have released an agreement that pledges to “substantially expand” grants for scientific research and to “establish a system granting legal effect to the use of maiden names”. Both are promising for researchers, but the future of Japanese science will depend on how these policies are implemented.