Cultivating Communities for Women in STEM
My Work
Nonprofit works
Volunteer works
Member, the diversity and inclusion committee, the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence (2023 - )
Judge, Kosen GCON - Girls's competition for National Institute of Technology Association (2023, 2024)
Featured Media
Gender Discrimination Reflected in AI To Avoid Distortions in Human Society (The Asahi Shimbun, Sep 23, 2023, original title "AIに反映されるジェンダー差別 人間社会のゆがみを避けるためには")
Japan Needs a Lot More Tech Workers. Can It Find a Place for Women? (The New York Times, Sep 29, 2021)
When Will Japan's Gender Gap Be Bridged? Waffle's Goals for the Future #30UNDER30 (Forbes Japan, Nov, 11, 2020, original title "日本のジェンダーギャップはいつ埋まる？ Waffleのふたりが目指す未来 ＃30UNDER30")
Featured Talks and Lectures
JPN / ENG (Coming soon)
Waffle and Rikopeer
As a problem-solver with entrepreneurship mindset, I aim to create "unleaky" pipeline of Women in STEM together with two organizations.
Waffle is the first nonprofit I co-founded in 2019, targeted to empower and educate middle and high school female students to provide opportunities to select STEM majors at the college entrance. While I served as the co-founder, we successfully provided education to 1000+ students with the support of Google.org, Lenovo Foundation, US Embassy, and more. Such grassroots programs led to success in policy advising to the Japanese government as well, resulting in adding the importance of educating middle and high school female students in “Basic Policies for the Economic and Fiscal Management and Reform” published by the Cabinet Office.
Rikopeer is the second nonprofit I co-founded in 2024, after leaving Waffle and bringing my career focus back to tech again. Rikopeer, as the name implies making peers in Riko (STEM in Japanese), focuses on uniting female students in the engineering department from various universities, aiming at improving the retention of women in engineering. As the universities in the US often have Women in STEM student organizations, our ambition is to make a Rikopper chapter for each university in Japan so that the students can make friends and engage in professional activities together such as forming a hackathon team.
Please contact me for further reference or support for Rikopeer: asumisaito1@gmail.com
Japan still suffers from the stigma of Women in STEM
The rate of female students in the engineering department in Japan is 16%, ranking at the bottom among OECD countries. Japan holds the 125th position on the Gender Gap Ranking, while the US ranks 43rd. Gender stereotypes are still strongly prevalent in the country, resulting in young women avoiding intellectual paths such as STEM.
As a Japanese woman with a STEM background, I am committed to addressing this disparity by creating opportunities for future generations of women to excel in science and technology.
