The proportion of women running in Japan¡¯s general election next month has barely advanced, reports said Wednesday, despite a trailblazing win last year by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

Takaichi, a staunch conservative who admires Margaret Thatcher and took the helm in October, has shown little appetite for framing her leadership around gender and named a male-dominated Cabinet despite pledging to boost female representation.

Although a record 24% of the 1,285 Lower House candidates who kicked off their campaigns on Tuesday were women, according to the Asahi Shimbun and other media, the figure is just 1 percentage point up on the last general election.

The government set a goal in 2020 for 35% of the candidates for parliament¡¯s powerful Lower House to be women by 2025. A new target has yet to be announced.

¡°The inauguration of Prime Minister Takaichi doesn¡¯t appear to have sparked a strong movement within the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) to significantly increase the number of female candidates,¡± said Yuki Tsuji, professor at Tokai University and politics expert.

The proportion of female candidates within Takaichi¡¯s ruling LDP is just 12.8%, down by more than 3 percentage points since the last election, Jiji Press reported.

Meanwhile, the opposition isn¡¯t highlighting the presence of women and diverse candidates as a party advantage, Tsuji said.

But she also noted that the sudden dissolution of parliament by Takaichi last week for the Feb. 8 election ¡°left little time to carefully select and field candidates¡± and could be ¡°the main reason why the number of female candidates hasn¡¯t grown much.¡±

The party with the highest proportion of women is Sanseito ¡ª a small but fast-growing party pledging ¡°Japanese first¡± polices ¡ª which has 82 women among 190 candidates, around 43%, according to Jiji Press.

Despite promising ¡°Nordic¡± levels of representation in her government, Takaichi named just two other women in her 19-strong cabinet.

In Japanese politics and boardrooms, women are rare. The country ranked 118 out of 148 in the World Economic Forum¡¯s 2025 Gender Gap Report.

Nordic nations Iceland, Finland and Norway occupied the top three places.

Takaichi¡¯s views on gender place her on the right of an already conservative LDP, and she opposes revising a 19th-century law requiring married couples to share the same surname, a rule that overwhelmingly results in women taking their husband¡¯s name.

Yu Uchiyama, political science professor at the University of Tokyo, said that ¡°Takaichi is so famous for her conservative stance that it is unlikely that she will devote her energies to such policies¡± like promoting DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion).