Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the world's biggest, will from now on vote against the nomination of all-male boards in Japanese companies, a senior fund official said Tuesday.

In a bid to promote diversity and gender equality, the fund, currently worth more than 15 trillion kroner ($1.34 trillion), already rejects nominations to boards for companies in Europe and North America that do not include at least two women.

Japan, where the business world has long been very male-dominated, had been given a grace period.

"Of the developed markets, we hadn't started to vote against companies in Japan, because they were so far behind that we really would have hit a large number of companies," Carine Smith Ihenacho, head of governance and compliance at the fund, told AFP.

In 2021, the fund gave Japanese companies "two years to improve," she added. ...continue reading