Japanese Women Outperform Men After Rigging Stopped In Exam Scores

By not giving men an unfair advantage we can help women rise. This has been proven in a medical college in Japan where women have outperformed their male counterparts after the rigging process that gave an unfair advantage to men was discarded this year.

This progressive step was taken by the Juntendo University in Tokyo. The university issued statistics where the female pass percentage in the entrance exam was 8.28% and the male pass percentage was limited to 7.72%. Out of 1679 women who took the entrance examination, 139 had qualified it whereas of the 2202 males that took the exam, 170 qualified.

The dean of the university tried justifying this practice by saying that women mature faster and that women have better communication skills. He says, "In some way, this was a method designed to help the male applicants."

This is the first time in the seven-year history of the exam that women outperformed men and that their pass rate is higher than that of men. This came as a reverberation to the abolishment of the unfair treatment of women in the entrance exam. This, in turn, came as another result of the revelation made last year. The University used to manipulate exam results in order to give advantage to the male exam takers. This was done so that males appear to be in larger number than women. It also cancelled out women who took the exam earlier and had failed to qualify and in contrast first-time male exam takers were given preference.

The Yomiuri Shimbun Newspaper had revealed last year in August that the university had rigged exam procedure in order to help male exam takers. This has been in practice for more than a decade now and that the authorities had ready reasons for it, one of them being that the women would go on to become doctors and leave the profession once they have children.

In India, we had 51% of women doctors in the year 2014-15. Over the last five years, we have produced 4500 more female doctors than male ones.

Following strong criticism, the university removed the gender-based anomalies and last month, the university also revealed that the females had outperformed males after the rigged procedure was discarded. In fact, the pass rate of women at the Tokyo Medical School was 20.4%, 0.4% higher than among male candidates. Interestingly, the success rate for women when the discriminatory process was in practice was only 2.9 %, whereas it was 9% for when, directing us towards the fact that how the rigging process impeded the success of women. The medical school scandal reinforced claims of institutional sexism in the Japanese workplace and education, frustrating efforts by the Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, to create a society “in which women can shine.”

While Japan stresses on empowering women, it compares really poorly with other countries in promoting women to senior positions. In 2016, women accounted for just 21.1% of all the doctors in Japan. However, in India, we had 51% of women doctors in the year 2014-15. Over the last five years, we have produced 4500 more female doctors than male ones.

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