Big Japanese companies are like small communist governments. Once you are in, you get paid the same as everyone else, regardless of your value, because it's not

Big Japanese companies are like small communist governments. Once you are in, you get paid the same as everyone else, regardless of your value, because it's not as though you could leave. If you left, nobody would hire you, so your "market value" would be next to zero. So why pay you more? You get paid the same as everyone else in your hiring cohort, and you do whatever work they tell you to do, and that will always be true for the rest of your life. You marry someone from the company, and if the company tells you to leave her and go live overseas for a few years, you do it. Your loyalty is to the State---I mean the Company---first. In exchange, you get a lifetime security net that gives you the same guaranteed life as your coworkers. Serve the hive, and you need never fear. If you ever left it, you would never again have access to a security net from anybody, and with so much of your life depending on your hive membership, you're unlikely ever to leave or to be thrown out. In such a system, where you don't know how you could survive outside the hive, maintaining the hive matters more to the bees than increasing profits. Yes, maybe the hive could get some economic benefit from hiring more women due to their being undervalued in the market, but maybe the unintended consequences of changing something like that might destabilize the hive. It's just not worth the risk if your whole life is going to depend on this one hive. And maybe your hive could benefit by hiring skilled people in mid-career. But none of the hives do that. They've never done it and don't even know how. What would you pay somebody joining the hive in mid-career? How could you even judge the value of someone financially? We've never done that; nobody does that; there's no "market". What impact might it have on existing bees, who have been together since age 22, to have a foreign bee join them in mid-life? It's just not worth the risk to the long-term stability of the safety net on which all life depends. Don't change anything. Do what has always worked, defend the hive, and it will defend you. I'm not sure if this is your idea of something "working on a societal level" but it's not mine. Ironically, I think this "stability over adaptation" approach puts Japan at greater risk of instability over the long run.