Local Construction of Global Standards: How Gender Diversity Has Become Corporate Social Responsibility in Japan

After decades of reluctance and resistance, Japanese firms have recently begun to embrace the cause of workplace gender diversity as part of their response to the emerging global standards of corporate citizenship. We examine how gender diversity has been locally constructed as an urgent CSR issue for Japanese firms, focusing on the role of two professional groups—corporate social responsibility (CSR) and investor relations (IR) managers. CSR managers have made the case that the CSR performance of Japanese firms lags behind that of their global competitors because of their failure to address the historically low level of gender diversity. In cooperation with IR managers, they have theorized its economic benefits, by arguing that improving gender diversity can send a positive signal to foreign investors. This constructed advocacy of gender diversity by foreign investors has substantive changes. Using panel data on more than 800 major Japanese companies from 2001 to 2009, our analyses show that foreign share ownership and the within-firm influence of CSR and IR managers significantly improve gender diversity, especially at the board-director and managerial levels. By emphasizing the role of professionals in translating global standards into local contexts, our study makes a contribution to understanding the role of local actors in generating variation in the outcomes of global diffusion processes.