Compared with the beginning of the year, there seem to be fewer female members, while the number of male members has actually increased.

I’m Maezawa from the President’s Office, and I’ll answer this as well. Thank you for your question. I believe we’ve had a similar question before, but it seems that men and women respond differently when it comes to risk. Women tend to take even the slightest safety precaution when a situation becomes dangerous, while men seem more inclined to take an active approach whenever possible, even in risky situations. Also, we closed during the state of emergency, so we basically weren’t conducting interviews with women during that period. I think that may have had an impact as well. If 700 women join every month, it’s easy to see that stopping interviews would result in 700 fewer new members. The number of male members, on the other hand, barely decreased. There was also talk of the market for apps and similar services changing due to COVID, so perhaps some people moved over from those platforms around that time—but it may have nothing to do with it. The more realistic explanation may simply be that the number of men didn’t decrease even during COVID.

I’m Kazu, a male member. Despite how major the impact was, I felt that the number of female members hadn’t really decreased that much. However, it seems that many women quit soon after registering. Female membership has a high turnover rate, after all. Perhaps the number of women who left because of COVID ended up being just slightly higher than the number who joined during the pandemic. The number of male members has continued to grow steadily over the past few years, so I get the impression that COVID didn’t have much of an impact on them. Or perhaps the effects haven’t shown up yet because memberships are renewed annually.