I meant that this story is mainly newsworthy because women doing an IPO is very uncommon in Japan. I don't remember reading much about Julie Wainwright, who di

I meant that this story is mainly newsworthy because women doing an IPO is very uncommon in Japan. I don't remember reading much about Julie Wainwright, who did the "The RealReal" IPO at 8x the market cap in the US 2 years ago. As for gender roles, I believe they can both be harmful (if forced upon you) and very helpful (if voluntarily agreed upon). As an example, I rarely worry about my bad cooking skills these days, because my wife is exceptionally good at it. So in effect, we have created a traditional role of "the woman in the kitchen", but it's the result of us trying to optimize how things work out for us, not because of some external societal pressure. Similarly, "guys carrying heavy stuff" is such a cliche because it usually works well, due to differences in biological growth. I'm 15% taller than my wife, and for some tasks that makes all the difference between easy and horrible.