"The one that stays at home": Why did the applicants in Japan be undervalued
Dmitry Kurkin
Tokyo Medical University Admissions Office Over the years, she has underestimated her appraisals — last week, citing an unnamed source, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, one of Japan’s largest dailies, reported this. An insider stated that the university management followed a discriminatory policy since 2011, thus artificially reducing the proportion of women studying at the university to thirty percent.
It is reported that the examiners considered their actions "necessary evil". "Many graduates abandoned medical practice in order to give birth and raise children. [At Tokyo Medical University] they came to the tacit understanding that [taking more men to university] you can solve the shortage of doctors," the source said. The current leadership of the university has already promised to conduct an internal audit and understand the situation.
The exam at Tokyo Medical University consists of two stages: a written test and an interview (with a short essay), to which only applicants with a passing score are allowed. According to the sources, the downgrading of grades to women occurred at the first stage, so it was almost impossible to catch the examiners by the hand.
The facts of gender discrimination became known only now, amid another major scandal in which the first persons of the university were involved. Masahiko Usui, president of the university's board of trustees, and Mamoru Suzuki, president of the university (both have now left their posts) are accused of bribing Futoshi Sano, a high-ranking official from the Ministry of Education of Japan. The investigation claims that Usui and Suzuki offered Sano to get his son to the university if the official knocks out additional subsidies from the ministry.
The problem of an acute shortage of practitioners in Japan really exists, and they have been talking about it for a long time - at least since the early 80s. According to statistics, an average of 2.2 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants in the country. This is no longer enough, and the situation is aggravated by the fact that Japan is located in a seismically dangerous region (the elimination of the consequences of natural disasters also requires professional doctors) and the fact that the country's population is rapidly aging (increasing the need for regular medical care). Concerned about the creation of new medical schools, the Japanese government met with resistance from the national medical association: they said that the problem was not so much a shortage of staff as in an unregulated balance. Indeed, graduates of Japanese medical universities are not eager to go to practice where they are most needed - in poor rural areas.
The phrase "working mother" for many Japanese women sounds like an oxymoron: they simply do not have time to combine one with another
However, to transfer the blame for the lack of doctors to women who "too often go on maternity leave" is nothing more than a substitution of notions. The current Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, has repeatedly stated that the state should create favorable conditions for working women. However, in practice, Japan is still a country where maternity leave for women does not involve returning to work. The phrase "working mother" for many Japanese women sounds like an oxymoron: they simply do not have time to combine one with another. The company’s dedication in Japan is built into a kind of cult, and it is expected from a woman who chooses between work and family that she chooses the latter. By the way, there are male decrees in Japan, but almost no one uses them: employees are afraid that they will not get promoted, because in the eyes of their bosses they will not look diligent enough, in other words, they don’t want to ruin their careers.
A former employee of a law firm said that before the birth of a child, she had to work up to three hundred hours a month. Combining such intensity with child care is unrealistic, so seventy percent of Japanese women leave work after the birth of their first child. “Vumenomika”, which Abe so hoped for, did not take place: by the level of gender inequality in the ranking of the World Economic Forum, Japan fell back to 114th place in 2017. This state of affairs boomerangs both on unemployed women and working men. The Japanese, as is known, literally die at work: “caros,” that is, death from recycling, has been studied since the eighties as a separate social phenomenon.
The roots of prejudice towards women, which Tokyo Medical is suspected of, are more likely to be found in patriarchal attitudes that are still strong in Japanese society. The woman is still given the place of the “housekeeper”, the man is the role of the breadwinner, which, in turn, requires unlimited devotion to the company for which he works. Gender roles have been established even at the language level: the reference “husband” in Japanese is synonymous with the words “master”, “wife” in literal translation - “the one that stays at home”. The established norm is well illustrated by the figure: in 2007, Japanese men spent only half an hour on housework and taking care of children or elderly relatives.
It is not clear how the Japanese society will react to the scandal. It is unlikely to be a turning point for the local movement for gender equality - but only because he has enough reasons to start, say, a large-scale #MeToo campaign, as happened recently in neighboring Korea. In any case, solving one problem (lack of practicing doctors), exacerbating another (gender inequality), is not the best way to solve at least one of them.
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