Asia - Discrimination against women in Japan

The scandal at Tokyo Medical University is an unusually blatant example of a common bias

JAPAN has made a lot of noise in recent years about demolishing the traditional view that women should stay at home while men go out to work. So it was shocking when, on August 7th, Tokyo Medical University, a prestigious medical school, confessed to marking down the test scores of female applicants to keep the ratio of women in each class below 30%. This systematic manipulation, university officials admitted, had gone on since 2006.

Their defence was that women are more likely to drop out to marry and have children. To judge female applicants to medical school purely on their merits would leave Japan with a shortage of doctors, they said.

The admission has caused outrage. But it is probably just the tip of the iceberg, says Yumiko Murakami of the OECD. The government says it will investigate every medical school in the country.

Doctoring has long been a male bastion. But it is not the only one. Japanese companies routinely favour male candidates when they recruit university students, says Ms Murakami. Discrimination is rife in banks and trading houses, where stamina and loyalty, qualities somehow associated with men, are prized, says Mari Miura, a political scientist at Sophia University. She recalls a job-recruiter breezily admitting to dropping English as a requirement for new entrants so as to weed out female candidates, who tended to have better linguistic confidence and skills.

Employers discriminate against women because they are likely to drop out; but they drop out partly because they are so poorly treated. Workplaces are seldom family-friendly. Hours are long and not nearly flexible enough for women who are pregnant or raising children. A former nurse at a Tokyo hospital says she quit after being told she would get no concessions for being pregnant. The head nurse said that given the uncertainty about the outcome of early pregnancy anyway, she should maintain her workload. A woman at a private kindergarten was reprimanded for getting pregnant out of turn—the director had laid down “shifts” for when workers could have children.

All this embarrasses a government that has promised to make women “shine”, its condescending catchphrase for female empowerment. The policy seems based on the need for more workers rather than on genuine concern for women. Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, says he wants to bring millions more women into the workforce to make up for a labour shortfall caused by its ageing and declining population. Japan’s working-age population is projected to shrink from 77m in 2015 to 48m by 2060.

Yet in relative terms the country seems to be going backwards. The World Economic Forum’s latest gender-gap index ranks Japan in 114th place out of 144 nations, a slide of 23 places from a decade ago. The proportion of Japanese doctors who are women is less than half the OECD average of 46%.

More female role models would help, says Ms Murakami. Yet in the field where Mr Abe has indisputable sway, that of politics, the record under his premiership is lamentable. Just a tenth of MPs in the lower house are women, putting Japan in 158th place out of 193 countries. Just two members of Mr Abe’s 20-strong cabinet are women, including Seiko Noda, in charge of women’s empowerment. Ms Noda, who makes little secret of her ambition to dethrone Mr Abe in a leadership contest next month, has just published a book called “Grab the Future”, her manifesto for pulling Japan into line with “global standards”. She has almost no chance of winning.