1Levity
It is a universal phenomenon that the IT sector is male dominated. Multiply this IT condition with working in Japan—a conservative society that stubbornly favors men in mainstream roles and women in supporting roles—and you can imagine the painful double penalty that a woman in the IT sector suffers in Japan.
Yuki Shingu, CEO of Future Architect, a major domestic IT consulting firm, elegantly overturns this assumption. It certainly helps that Future Architect is a relatively young firm with a progressive culture. Rather than emulating the conventional tech‐savvy IT engineer archetype, Shingu has consistently played to her strength—differentiating herself early on through her management skills.
Shingu is also nontraditional in that she abruptly left her job and eventually returned to her employer mid‐career. True to her own life priorities rather than the world's expectations, Shingu, at the height of her career, quit to care for an ailing family member. Her decision, and her return prior to her eventual ascent to the CEO role, sent a strong message to employees about the new relationship between them and their employer: your life is yours to design; the company will back you up. Shingu stresses the importance of customizing one's career path through dialogue between the employee and employer.
It is a tale especially refreshing in the Japanese work context. Future Architect, unencumbered by the heavy weight of history—the founder is in his late 60s and still presides ...