A Japanese medical university has systematically discriminated against female applicants because women tend to quit as doctors after starting families, causing hospital staffing shortages, media reports said Thursday.
The Yomiuri newspaper said Tokyo Medical University has 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 share of successful female applicants reached 38 percent of the total in.
Other Japanese media, including NHK public television and Kyodo News, also reported the exam manipulation. Quoting unnamed sources, NHK said female applicants’ scores were slashed by about 10 percent in some years.
The allegation surfaced during the school’s probe of a separate scandal in which its former director was accused of granting admission to the son of a top education bureaucrat in exchange for a favor.
The school’s public affairs department said officials were surprised by the Yomiuri report and had no knowledge of the reported manipulation. It promised to look into the matter.
Yoshiko Maeda, head of the Japan Medical Women’s Association, said it was astonishing that women in Japan are still being stripped of their right to seek entry to the medical profession.
Admissions records released to The Associated Press by the school show the percentage of women who passed the entrance exam rose from 24 percent in 2009 to 38 percent in 2010. The figure has since stayed below that level until decreasing to 18 percent this year. The ratio of female applicants who were accepted this year was 2.9 percent, compared to 8.8 percent for men.
Source: Bloomberg
