Tokyo Medical University officials allegedly tampered with female applicants’ exam results in a bid to reduce the number of women in medicine, according to reports in Japan.
Tokyo Medical University, a private institution consistently ranked among the country's best for clinical medicine, has been automatically lowering the entrance exam results of female applicants for the past decade, an attempt to keep the ratio of women in each class of students below 30 percent, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported. A specific coefficient was reportedly applied to the scores of all female applicants, lowering them by 10 to 20 percent.
The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said Tokyo Medical University had manipulated the entrance exam results of women since about 2011 to keep the female student population low. Quoting unidentified sources, it said the manipulation started after the proportion of successful applicants who were women reached 38% in 2010.
The school’s public affairs department said officials were surprised by the Yomiuri Shimbun report and had no knowledge of the reported manipulation. It promised to look into the matter.
According to university insiders with knowledge of the scheme, the doctoring of tests was carefully planned – a specific coefficient was used to artificially lower the scores of all women applying to the institution.
The education minister, Yoshimasa Hayashi, said: “Entrance exams that unfairly discriminate against women are absolutely not acceptable.” He said the ministry would decide on its response after receiving the results of an investigation from the school.
According to an unnamed source who spoke to the Yomiuri Shimbun, the school thought female students would eventually leave the medical profession to give birth and raise their children. “There was a silent understanding as one way to resolve the doctor shortage,” the source said, adding that the policy was a “necessary evil.”
Yoshiko Maeda, the head of the Japan Medical Women’s Association, said it was astonishing that women were being stripped of their right to seek entry to the medical profession.
“Instead of worrying about women quitting jobs, they should do more to create an environment where women can keep working,” Maeda said in a statement on the association’s Facebook page. “And we need working-style reform, which is not just to prevent overwork deaths but to create a workplace where everyone can perform to the best of their ability regardless of gender.”
Kyoko Tanebe, an executive board member at the Japan Joint Association of Medical Professional Women, told the Japan Times that other medical institutions probably have similar policies that discriminate against female applicants. According to recent data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, women make up less than a quarter of doctors in Japan — the lowest proportion among the 34 OECD countries studied.
Japanese citizens reacted with outrage on social media at the allegations of rigged exam results. One posted: “Women are told they have to give birth; if they don’t, they’re mocked as being ‘unproductive’, but then again, just the possibility that they might give birth is used to cut their scores. What’s a woman supposed to do?”
And even if Japanese women do drop out of the profession at higher rates than men right now, it is not the role of medical schools to fix that, Yusuke Tsugawa, a Japanese doctor working as an assistant professor of medicine at UCLA, argued. “Their job, their role and their mission is to train the doctors. Their mission is not to ensure an optimal workforce in Japan,” he said.
Source: Financial Times