Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Policy

The CITIZEN Group aims to create an environment where diverse employees are provided with equitable opportunity and can work while respecting each other and remaining true to themselves, thereby becoming a corporate group where everyone can contribute to its growth and achievements. We will achieve sustainable corporate growth by ensuring that all our employees embody our corporate philosophy and satisfy the needs of our customers around the world.

Diversity

The CITIZEN Group respects the diversity and individualities of its employees in every aspect, including gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, nationality, ethnicity, culture, values, experience, employment status, lifestyle, and disability.

Equity

The CITIZEN Group provides each and every employee with not only support tailored to their own background and needs but also the equitable opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities.

Inclusion

The CITIZEN Group creates an environment where diverse employees can work with a sense of psychological safety while remaining true to themselves, feel a strong sense of belonging to the organization, and recognize that they are contributing to the achievements of their workplace and company by fully demonstrating their capabilities.

CITIZEN Group’s Structure for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

The entire CITIZEN Group’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) initiatives are overseen by the Citizen Watch Human Resources (HR) Department as the secretariat. At each Group company in Japan, its HR Department is responsible for implementing decisions made by the Group HR Committee, ensuring respect for human rights in business activities, and addressing human rights risks at work. The Group HR Committee’s decisions are reported as part of the Group’s materiality measures to the Board of Directors through the Sustainability Committee, and their implementation is promoted under the supervision of management.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Roadmap

The CITIZEN Group aims to ensure that its diverse employees can demonstrate their talents fully and focuses particularly on empowering female employees to do so. Therefore, under the leadership of Citizen Watch Co., Ltd., we have set a target of increasing the ratio of female managers in the Group to 20% or more by 2030. We are thus making Group-wide efforts to ensure that diverse employees can achieve their potential and to develop and promote female managers.

Empowerment of Female Employees

The CITIZEN Group conducts a Group-wide career development support program to help female employees fully leverage their own capabilities and develop a positive vision of their future careers. The FY2025 program, on the theme of well-being, was intended for female employees in the training stage who were expected to become managers and aimed at creating a foundation for their positive attitudes toward expressing their individuality and taking on new challenges while overcoming unconscious biases and a weak sense of self-efficacy, which are obstacles unique to women. With the attendance of 27 employees, the program included a lecture and a dialogue workshop on well-being, as well as a role model session with senior employees serving as guest speakers. This program, in which female employees come together from different Group companies, is aimed at providing them with the opportunity to broaden their own horizons by interacting with people with diverse values and experiences. We will continue to implement this initiative in order to create an environment where female employees can continue to take on challenges in their own way and provide them with phased career development support. By doing so, we aim to increase the ratio of female managers and make steady steps forward to achieving CITIZEN Group Vision 2030.

[Case Study] Citizen Watch Co., Ltd.’s Initiatives for Empowerment of Female Employees

Structure for Empowerment of Female Employees

At Citizen Watch Co., Ltd., the president himself has declared that the company will proactively create a favorable working environment for diversity promotion, and the director in charge has signed the Tokyo Forum for Women and the Future Joint Declaration. Through these actions, they have reaffirmed the company’s commitment to developing female managers through the top-management-led reform of organizational culture and to creating a comfortable workplace for everyone.
Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. has so far invited outside experts to give diversity lectures to inspire management staff to change their mindsets and provided training to male and female employees who are raising children, as well as to their managers. To ensure that these employees can continue to work effectively despite some restrictions, the company has provided them with the opportunity in various forms to learn how to interact with their families, colleagues, and managers, thereby encouraging them to change their mindsets.
The company also provides the managers of female managers with the opportunity to become reacquainted with the background to DEI promotion and learn how to raise future female managers’ awareness and what specific career support to provide to them in order to assist them in their career development, while requiring them to interview those women in person. In FY2025, the company initiated career interviews with young and mid-career employees, thereby continuing to support their career development through dialogue.

Initiatives to Support the Skills Development and Careers of Female Employees

Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. not only provides rank-specific training but also encourages all employees to participate in voluntary and optional learning programs in order to create an environment where everyone, regardless of gender, can continue to learn. Meanwhile, in consideration of the limited number of senior female employees who can act as role models for female managers, the company has held workshops for female managers. These workshops are aimed at helping participants become aware of diverse career paths through dialogue and networking with each other, thereby encouraging them to exercise leadership in their own way and continue their career building efforts.
Additionally, the company also allows female senior managers to participate in "cross-mentoring" beyond the boundaries of companies as an opportunity for growth toward the next position, while encouraging female department managers to broaden their horizons and increase their motivation through networking with people inside and outside the company. Female department managers are also provided with the opportunity to participate in external study and training sessions so that they can have a solider management perspective and demonstrate their own capabilities more fully as leaders.
These initiatives have helped many female managers network with each other and give inspiration and encouragement to each other, thereby allowing them to demonstrate leadership in their own way. These female managers have been providing younger female employees with role models available close to them, contributing to the fostering of an organizational culture that empowers women.
As a measure to facilitate understanding of the relationship between women’s careers and their health among their managers and colleagues, the company constantly provides original videos in which industrial physicians explain the importance of career design in consideration of infertility treatment, timing of childbirth, etc.

Support for Making Work More Comfortable for Women and Enabling Them to Succeed

In recent years, Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. has seen a maternity leave rate of 100%, as well as 100% of employees returning to work after maternity leave. The company also allows eligible employees to work reduced and/or staggered working hours for childcare until their children graduate from elementary school. Nursing care leave of up to two hours a work day is also granted to eligible employees. Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. also offers paid annual leave in one-hour increments and accrued paid leave (pooled leave), which can be employed for childcare support until the child completes junior high school. Use of leave of these kinds is allowed also for family nursing care, self-development activities, and volunteer activities. The company therefore promotes flexible work styles to create an environment that allows employees to continue to demonstrate their own capabilities while experiencing various life events, such as marriage, childbirth, and caregiving, as well as encouraging employees to utilize these systems. Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. has also set the target of male employees taking parental leave of five days or more before their children reach one year of age and encourages eligible employees to do so. The company actively advocates male employees’ parental leave and involvement in childcare through measures such as encouraging their managers to create a work environment in which anyone can take leave easily regardless of gender and to persuade eligible employees to take leave. We also post articles about the experiences of those who have taken parental leave on our in-house website.
Furthermore, the company also has in place a re-employment system for which all employees are eligible, whereby those who have left the company—including resignation due to a spouse’s job transfer—can return to the company by application, regardless of the reason for their leaving the company, in principle. This system has been utilized by many employees.

Support System for Employees Engaging in Various Care/Treatment Activities (Summary)

Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. has established a system to support employees working while engaging in childcare, nursing care, treatment of specified illnesses, or infertility treatment in order to help diverse employees play an active role in the company. The company will continue to expand and enhance this system while listening to current and potential users.

[Case Study] CITIZEN Group’s Initiatives for Empowerment of Female Employees

Acquisition of the Kurumin Certification Mark

Kurumin Certification is a system under which the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare certifies companies that have achieved their goals and met certain standards for their general business owner action plans, formulated in accordance with the Act on Advancement of Measures to Support Raising Next-Generation Children, as companies that support child-rearing.
Four companies in The CITIZEN Group—Citizen Watch Co., Ltd., CITIZEN MACHINERY CO., LTD., CITIZEN FINEDEVICE CO., LTD., and CITIZEN SYSTEMS JAPAN CO., LTD.—have received Kurumin Certification as companies that promote initiatives to support employees’ efforts to balance work and childcare. Furthermore, CITIZEN WATCH MANUFACTURING CO., LTD. has obtained Platinum Kurumin Certification as one of the top-ranking companies under this system.
The CITIZEN Group will continue to enhance its support for employees rearing their children while working, thereby accelerating the creation of an environment where everyone can work with a sense of psychological safety.

LGBTQ Initiatives

In FY2025, just as in FY2024, The CITIZEN Group provided all Group employees with an e-learning program focusing on LGBTQ people as part of its human rights training in order to broaden their understanding of this theme. As part of its LGBTQ initiatives, Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. has so far made it optional for job applicants to specify their gender when submitting documents for employment. Taking a further step, we have now set up an external consultation desk to enable employees to feel more comfortable asking for advice. We will continue to promote the creation of an environment in which employees can leverage their diverse values and experiences to demonstrate their capabilities.

Employment of Persons with Disabilities

The CITIZEN Group is actively committed to employing people with disabilities, in line with our basic policy of "working together." For example, since 2018, Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. has been accepting interns from special needs schools every year. This initiative has provided those interns with work experience and some of them even with stable employment, allowing them to continue to work at the company, with four people employed from among those interns by the company to date.

For more than 40 years, we have also been providing employment support in cooperation with Social Welfare Corporation Murayama-en (Higashimurayama City, Tokyo), where people with disabilities engage in subcontracted work, such as counting and packaging watch parts and after-sales service parts and dismantling watches. We will continue to make efforts to further expand employment and job opportunities.