After sexist flap, women overtake men in Japan med school acceptance

Jan 27, 2022 | News On Japan

Jan 27, 2022 (Nikkei) - For what appears to be the first time, the acceptance rate for women has exceeded that for men at Japanese medical schools.

Among male applicants for medical programs at national, public and private universities, the overall acceptance rate was 13.51%, lower than the 13.6% for women, according to data from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

The share of universities reporting lower acceptance rates for women than men dropped drastically to 44% in fiscal 2021 from 67% the year before.

This marks a watershed moment in Japan's medical education history. Despite the growing ranks of aspiring female physicians, medical schools had long remained skeptical about women balancing work and family life as doctors.

Tokyo Medical University's practice of inflating entrance exam scores for the sons of Education Ministry bureaucrats came to light in 2018, and similar score manipulation practices at other medical universities were reported. In many cases, schools limited the admission of women and those who failed the exam many times in the past by giving their essays low marks.

Facing public outrage, the Education Ministry released gender breakdowns of those accepted to all college medical schools from fiscal 2013 through fiscal 2018. The plan after that was to release the breakdowns for universities that had admitted to score manipulation, but lawmakers argued successfully for releasing all data from fiscal 2019 and onward.

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