As I had introduced before, the well-known cosmetics company, L'Oreal, presides over a program called "For Women in Science" (As this website is very pretty, browse it) in collaboration with the UNESCO and appeals its existence to the world. This year the program has celebrated its 10th anniversary at Paris in the spring. The prizewinners until now were invited and Congratulatory meeting was held.
3 years ago, Japan has also launched a program to award young female researchers living in Japan. I attended the commending ceremony and congratulatory party last year. Also this year, wonderful people were commended and their family members, teachers and fellow researchers attended the ceremony. It was a very splendid gathering and I was glad to see it.
4 brilliant people were selected for this year. We shared a cheerful, pleasent time together.
A women's magazine, Marie Claire, has also participated in this activity and presented red roses (Photo) to all the winners. I met Dr. Noriko Osumi, whom I worked with 2 days ago in Okinawa and her mother who is also a famous scientist.
Photo Ms. Bando and 4 winners
Ms. Bando, a chief of gender equality bureau of cabinet office, mentioning that percentage of female scientist in Japan is the lowest among OECD countries, encouraged the audience for further effort. I was responsible to propose a toast and spoke on various topics like, though, Gender Development Index of woman in Japan is within top 10 in the world, Gender Empowerment Index of woman is as low as about 40th in 70 countries in the world. This difference is due to the male oriented society which is not competency based. There may be some hint in understanding the basic difference between male and female in Japan, in what we saw of (male) baseball and (female) softball at this year's Beijing Olympic. In that sense soccer, wrestling and judo, etc. as well. Please think about it. I think actually here lies the problems of Japanese society.
I would like to express my appreciation to all the winners, family members, fellow researchers, people involved in the selections and all related people for their hard work.
At any rate, we can see a strategy of a world class enterprises when such prizes are awarded. Each winner, over a period of years, will act as an ambassador of L'Oreal and will fulfill wonderful duty of moving the mind of men and catching the hearts of women in the world and act as advertising tower of the sponsor enterprise. I think there is no such a splendid and beautiful advertising media as this. I expect Japanese enterprises to think more strongly about social contribution from this viewpoint. This is what social responsibility (CSR) of the enterprises is all about.
