Women in Jinja Honchō

Revd Abë, whom I accompanied to the meeting in Kazakhstan, is a woman. In fact, everyone in the International Section of Jinja Honchō is a woman at the moment, apart from the consultants. We talked a bit about this while we were in Kazakhstan, and it seems that about 40% of the staff at Jinja Honchō are women now. What is more, Revd Abë could not think of any sections that had no women. She is also one of the three current female section heads in Jinja Honchō.

On the other hand, Jinja Honchō has no female department heads, and, as far as I know, never has had.

I do not think that this is a good thing, but the evidence is that they are doing everything they can to change it. Indeed, I expect it to change in the near future, because one of the female section heads has been at that level for about five years. That is around the length of time at which section heads get promoted to department head, and so the next time there is a vacancy, I think there is a good chance that she will move up.

A roughly even gender balance among department heads is probably not going to happen for at least a decade, and probably more, however. There are not enough female employees with the appropriate level of experience to make it possible earlier. I might well live long enough to see it happen, but it isn’t certain. On the other hand, I am confident that I will live to see at least one female department head, as long as a truck doesn’t deliver me to an isekai.

It is worth noting that Jinja Honchō is not representative of the Shinto community as a whole. About 15% of priests are women, as are about 30% of newly qualified priests. Jinja Honchō has a substantially higher proportion of women than either of those groups. That strongly suggests to me that they are deliberately recruiting more women in an attempt to get a more balanced gender ratio.

In an important sense, I think Jinja Honchō has already achieved what we might call “gender equity”. I do not think that being a woman at Jinja Honchō is a hindrance to your career there anymore. This has not yet led to a gender balance at all levels of the organisation simply because it takes time for equality of opportunity to work through a system. If there are ten men for every woman at a certain level of an organisation, the fact that the woman is just as likely to be promoted as the men does not mean that the next level up is going to be balanced any time soon.

But, at Jinja Honchō, I think it is now just a matter of time.

In the Shinto community more generally things are a bit different. There is still a general assumption that men are priests and women are miko. This means that, at many jinja, women are only appointed to vacancies for priests if there are no men available to take the job. And with the typical tenure of a chief priest being measured in decades, it will take a very long time to get a balanced ratio, even if the bias is removed today.

So we had best get working on removing that bias.