August 3, 2018
Japanese Communist Party parliamentarians, Miyamoto Toru and Kira Yoshiko, on August 2 urged the Education Ministry to look into Tokyo Medical University’s alleged discrimination against female applicants and take measures to prevent a recurrence. They also demanded support for affected parties.
JCP Miyamoto and Kira called an Education Ministry official in the Diet building in regard to a media report that stated that Tokyo Medical University manipulated women applicants’ entrance exam scores.
In the meeting, the JCP lawmakers said that what the medical university did violates the Constitution stipulating gender equality before the law. They went on to say that the university’s act is unforgivable as it affected many women applicants’ future aspirations.
Regarding this issue, Miyamoto and Kira requested the ministry to find out if other undergraduate medical institutions did the same or similar thing. As preventive measures, the two proposed that the ministry impose on these institutions obligations concerning entrance exams which include the releasing of pass rates and minimum pass marks by sex. The ministry official in reply said that the ministry will give the JCP lawmakers’ demands consideration.
The gender discrimination scandal involving Tokyo Medical University was revealed in the August 2 Yomiuri Shimbun.
According to the Yomiuri article, the university systematically lowered female applicants’ entrance exam scores with the aim of limiting the number of female students accepted. Such manipulation reportedly began in 2010. The university in its admission guide gives no explanation that the university sets a cap on the number of successful applicants by gender.
Yomiuri quoted a source familiar with the matter as saying, “Within the campus, there is a gender-biased atmosphere of supporting the argument that the backbone of the Tokyo Medical University Hospital is male doctors as it is a commonly held belief that female doctors are likely to quit their jobs due to pregnancy or childbirth.”
