A Japanese Woman Leading in 3-D TV, Breaking Japan’s Glass Ceiling

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/business/global/18screen.html


Leading in 3-D TV, Breaking Japan’s Glass Ceiling
By HIROKO TABUCHI

Published: January 17, 2011

TOKYO — It is the Achilles’ heel of 3-D television: the clunky glasses that viewers must wear to see images pop out in 3-D.
 
But Rieko Fukushima, a researcher at Toshiba, developed a way to do away with the glasses — and at the same time is helping to crack Japan’s glass ceiling for women.

“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t tough as a woman,” said Mrs. Fukushima, 39, who led Toshiba’s effort to develop the world’s first “naked eye” 3-D TV. The project began nine years ago, when she had just returned from maternity leave.

“Sometimes, I’d see it in my colleagues’ expressions,” she said “ ‘What? A woman? This age? In charge?’ ”

It is too early to know whether Toshiba can create a big consumer market for its new 3-D TVs, which it introduced in Japan in October and demonstrated this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

But Mrs. Fukushima’s breakthrough is a rare example of a company that has successfully tapped what some economists call Japan’s most underused resource: women.

According to a 2009 government survey, women made up 8 percent of managerial jobs in Japan; in the United States, women hold 43 percent of supervisory positions, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit in New York.

Only 65 percent of college-educated Japanese women are employed, many of them in low-paid temp jobs, compared with about 80 percent in the United States — “a significant lost economic opportunity for the nation,” Goldman Sachs said in a report in October. Over two-thirds of Japanese women leave the work force after their first child compared with just one-third of American women, the report said, often because of corporate and societal norms, as well as insufficient child care.

If Japan’s 60 percent female employment rate in 2009 could match the 80 percent rate among men, the country would have 8.2 million more workers to replenish its rapidly aging population and raise its gross domestic product by as much as 15 percent, said the report, by Kathy Matsui, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Japan.

Mrs. Fukushima’s success has therefore been welcomed as an inspirational tale of what can happen when things fall into place: a driven woman, a supportive family, and a company trying to diversify its work force.

“As a researcher, her ideas are cutting edge,” said Yuzo Hirayama, the head researcher at Toshiba’s TV research unit. “Her communication and networking skills also never cease to astound me.”

It was in 2002 that Mrs. Fukushima, after maternity leave for her first child, helped set up a new research and development team to explore the possibilities of 3-D displays. At the time, there was skepticism at Toshiba over whether 3-D technology could be commercialized.

Still, Mrs. Fukushima saw the potential in an early prototype. From the start, she was convinced that the viewing glasses that accompanied most 3-D technology would have to go.

In conventional 3-D TV technology that uses glasses, images for each eye are rapidly displayed one after the other. Filters in dedicated glasses flash on and off in sync with the TV, so that the right eye sees one image, then the left eye sees the next image, creating the illusion of 3-D.

But Mrs. Fukushima proposed a new approach: developing an algorithm that draws on a Toshiba imaging processor called the Cell to display nine images for each frame. A sheet on the screen angles each image so that the right eye sees only images meant for the right eye, while the left eye sees only images meant for the left eye.

The biggest challenge was making a TV that displays 3-D images even when viewed from wider angles. Toshiba has not entirely solved that problem: its TVs work best when viewed from within a 40-degree zone.

Designing a mass-production setup to keep costs down also posed difficulties, something Mrs. Fukushima tackled by building a network of experts from around the company. But pressure mounted as the project progressed.

“When I was just a researcher, a setback would only reflect badly on myself. But now that I was leading a team, I had to make sure nobody lost faith,” she said.

“I needed to think things through harder than anyone else,” she said. “I often felt overcome with worry, but I tried not to show that at meetings.”

A big break for the project came at a companywide technology fair in May, when an advanced prototype caught the eye of Norio Sasaki, Toshiba’s president. After that came an effort involving hundreds of engineers that pushed production schedules forward as much as two years. “2010 was supposed to be the year of the 3-D glasses,” she said. “We beat our rivals by going glasses-less.”

In Japan, a 20-inch model sells for 240,000 yen, or $2,880. Developing models in bigger sizes would be crucial in marketing the TVs globally, analysts say.

Mrs. Fukushima credits Toshiba with creating a hospitable environment for women. When she was on maternity leave, her supervisor e-mailed her with updates on the latest research and to assure her she “had a place to come back to,” she said.

Toshiba introduced measures in 2004 to help women balance work responsibilities with those at home, including more flexible working hours and a career track with a reduced workload. Now, the majority of women who take maternity leave return to their jobs, officials say.

Women have made more inroads into research positions than in other company divisions: though women number only 12 percent of Toshiba’s 113,500 workers, they make up 20 percent of its main research and development staff. Toshiba still has a way to go in promoting them to advanced positions, however: just 360 of the company’s 21,011 managers are women.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Fukushima’s husband, whom she met in college, has been an important supporter. He encouraged Mrs. Fukushima, a chemistry major, to pursue a master’s degree. Now they share household chores, with her husband, a university lecturer, in charge of making breakfast and sending their daughter to school, while Mrs. Fukushima handles dinner and bedtime. On a typical workday, Mrs. Fukushima works from about 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

It has not always gone smoothly for her. When she began looking for work in 1994, after the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble, many companies told her they were not hiring women, she recalled. Others said they had no experience in hiring women with master’s degrees.

But a Toshiba recruiter encouraged her to call, and after a short interview, she was hired along with another woman from the same university. “There were companies that weren’t even giving women interviews, but Toshiba hired two,” Mrs. Fukushima said. “I was elated.”

Now, she is held up as an example of a woman climbing Japan’s corporate ladder. Nikkei Woman, a monthly magazine for businesswomen, named Mrs. Fukushima its Woman of the Year last month.

Amid her newfound fame, Mrs. Fukushima says she considers her 9-year-old daughter her biggest fan. “She gets so excited to see me on TV,” Mrs. Fukushima said. The girl talks of being a researcher herself one day.

“It makes me happy,” Mrs. Fukushima said. “But these days I am careful to remind her that Daddy has an important job, too.”


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