What Japan’s First Female Prime Minister Could Mean for the Country’s Gender Politics

Sanae Takaichi just broke Japan’s highest glass ceiling.

The country’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Saturday voted Takaichi to be the party’s next leader, which is also effectively Japan’s next Prime Minister, setting her up to be the first woman to lead the country.

According to public broadcaster NHK, Takaichi, 64, secured 185 of 341 votes cast from the party’s sitting parliamentarians and current members. The race, much like last year’s party leadership contest that Takaichi initially led but ultimately lost to Shigeru Ishiba, went to a run-off vote between Takaichi and the would-be youngest-ever Prime Minister, 44-year-old Shinjiro Koizumi.

“Instead of just celebrating, I know the real challenge starts now,” Takaichi said. “I believe there is a mountain of work ahead and we must tackle it together with everyone's support. With all of you, I will strive to fire up the LDP and make it a positive party, which turns people's anxieties into hope.”

Following a premiership vote in Japan’s parliament, Takaichi will presumably take over from Ishiba, who resigned last month after the LDP suffered two election defeats since he took office in 2024. The party and its coalition partner lost majorities in both chambers of parliament for the first time since 1955, and are now operating under a minority government. The LDP’s successive election failures were in part caused by several political scandals that have in recent years tarnished the party’s reputation.

Takaichi, a more far-right pick for the typically center-conservative party, takes charge amid growing calls for the party to reform itself as Japanese voters have increasingly gravitated toward right-wing political movements.

Takaichi’s LDP election win also marks a departure from the long male-dominated politics that Japan is used to. The country ranks 118th among 148 economies, the lowest among G-7 members, in the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report, languishing particularly in the political empowerment metric.

But the elevation of Takaichi, a staunch conservative and fiscal dove who “behaves like men,” experts previously told TIME, and has embraced comparisons to former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, does not necessarily portend a brighter future for Japanese women.

“She doesn’t have a very positive track record on gender issues, on family-friendly policies, women’s empowerment,” Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian studies and history at Temple University’s Tokyo campus, tells TIME. “Coming from the right wing of the party, there is a strong, conservative family-and-social-values emphasis.”

Who is Sanae Takaichi?

A native of Nara Prefecture in the country’s west, Takaichi, the daughter of a manufacturing company employee and police officer, graduated from Kobe University in 1984 with a business degree. In 1987, she spent a year in the U.S. as part of a congressional fellowship, working for late feminist Rep. Pat Schroeder (D, Colo.).

Before entering politics, Takaichi briefly worked as a TV presenter. She began her political career in 1993, when she was elected as an independent to the lower parliamentary chamber, and she joined the LDP in 1996. Since her first term, she’s been reelected nine times.

Throughout her tenure, she developed a close working relationship with the assassinated Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, also a right-wing politician. During Abe’s first term, Takaichi served as minister of state in five portfolios, including one involving addressing gender equality and birth rates. Back then, Takaichi approached family policy reform in a “traditionalist” manner, wrote Hiroko Takeda, a professor of political science at Nagoya University in Japan, in 2018.

In December 2012, Takaichi became the LDP’s Policy Research Council Chairperson. Two years later, Abe, who became Prime Minister again, selected her to take over the internal affairs and communications ministry.

Takaichi ran for Prime Minister twice before, in 2021 and in 2024. She previously spoke about what it’s like to be a female candidate in the LDP. “It’s like an ant challenging an elephant—perhaps that’s what everyone thinks,” she said in 2021. “When I first ran for election, it was a time when being a woman was disadvantage. But it’s totally different now compared to 30 years ago.”

What is Takaichi’s gender agenda?

In the 2025 election, Takaichi appeared to promise an improvement in Japan’s treatment of women by promising Nordic-like female representation in her Cabinet and LDP executive committee. Ishiba’s Cabinet had only two female members, and only 15% of Japan’s parliament is female.

Takeda from Nagoya University tells TIME that Takaichi’s campaign this year is different from her previous election campaigns, as she’s previously not highlighted her gender on the trail. “This time she sort of started the appeal that she is a female candidate,” Takeda said. “She made a little bit of effort.”

But that effort is somewhat diminished by her history with policies that critics say work against women.

Takaichi has ardently defended conservative family values. Despite growing public support for a dual-surname law (fūfubessei), which allows married couples to have differing surnames, Takaichi remains a vocal opponent of such a reform because, she’s said, it “may destroy the social structure based on family units.”(Takaichi herself, however, still uses her maiden name despite being twice married to fellow lawmaker Taku Takaichi. Initially she had taken his surname, Yamamoto, but after their divorce and remarriage, he took hers.)

She’s also known to oppose Japan’s patrilineal imperial succession laws, “I feel extremely strongly about whether it would be right for our generation to destroy this,” Takaichi said in 2021, echoing the party’s stand to maintain that only men from the male imperial line could become emperor.

Nevertheless, Takaichi, on the 2025 campaign trail, promised partial tax deductions for babysitting fees and corporate tax incentives for companies offering in-house childcare—a sign that she may be warming up to more women-friendly policies. 

However, experts Takeda and Kingston warn that those could simply reflect a strategic softening to help her electoral prospects, without any real change of convictions.

“Maybe she’s had a moment to reflect on her past and decided she’s going to reinvent herself, but when people are suddenly making these changes during the campaign, one could be skeptical,” Kingston says.

Takaichi is largely expected to follow the right-wing agenda of her mentor, Abe. During his rule, he promoted the economic participation of women but stayed firm on the traditional social views on women that the LDP has championed.

“We tend to appreciate the symbolic effect,” Takeda says of Takaichi’s win. “There is some superficial impact by having a female leader. But I’m to think, with Takaichi becoming LDP’s President… the essence there is an Abe-type LDP politics, which is very conservative, particularly in terms of culture and tradition.”